


Try Not To Breathe

by commoncomitatus



Category: Defiance (TV)
Genre: F/F, Gen, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-28
Updated: 2015-11-05
Packaged: 2018-04-28 12:57:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 56,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5091614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commoncomitatus/pseuds/commoncomitatus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>S2-3 bridge, picking up at the end of "I Almost Prayed".  Berlin navigates the road between losing everything and finding something.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

—

Amanda walks her home.

Well. Not really ‘home’, so much as ‘up the stairs and onto the nearest available bed’. And not really ‘walks’, either, so much as ‘drags’.

For the most part, anyway; she tries to do the helpful walking thing at first, keeping her upright with an arm around her waist and offering an obscenely bare shoulder to lean on, but Berlin’s sense of direction is about as wrecked as the rest of her, and after she sends them careening into the wall for the third time in a row Amanda gives up and resorts to dragging.

The nearest available bed is in one of the night porters’ rooms, an out-of-the-way little cubby that by some miracle isn’t in use tonight. It’s small but very bright, and before Berlin even gets her head around where they are she finds herself face-down on the most expensive mattress she’s ever known.

It’s all very fancy, satin sheets and feather pillows swallowing the bruises on her cheek, her jaw, her ribs, the stitched-up gash under her eye, all the places where she’s raw and open and wounded. The softness chafes, makes it hard to ignore the pounding pain that starts in her jaw and pulses up to her brain. It makes it hard to hold herself together, to pretend that she’s not hurting and to keep the hurt on the inside where it belongs. The pain runs very deep, much deeper than the skin she’s wearing, and that awful chafing softness forces her to remember that she’s alive, that the dead don’t bleed.

Oh, how she wishes they did.

Amanda sits down next to her; the bed shifts a little with her weight, bobbing like a dinghy on open water, and Berlin presses her face to the stupid feathery pillow to muffle a groan. Between the jostling of the mattress and the smell of too much perfume, her guts are a roiling mess; it’s taking everything she has, frankly, not to turn her head to the side and vomit all over that perfect plush prostitute’s carpet. She can’t afford the humiliation, though, and she won’t burden Amanda any more than she already has. So, then, for Amanda’s sake, she presses her lips together, tries not to inhale too deeply, and refuses to let the weakness show.

“You okay?”

Not that it stops Amanda from seeing it anyway, apparently. It’s a stupid question, of course, and the answer should be more than obvious even with her face hidden; Berlin wants to send her away, say that she’s fine and let that be the end of it, but it’s so damn hard when Amanda is sitting so close, when she’s got her hand on Berlin’s back, when she’s palming gentle circles over the fabric of her shirt and tapping her fingers across her ribs. She’s done this before, Berlin can tell, and often enough to be really good at it.

Given her occupation, that shouldn’t really be as surprise as it is, and all the more so on a night like tonight. She’s probably had to deal with a dozen assholes like Berlin in the last few hours alone, grief-crazy idiots trying to drown their sorrows by drowning themselves and making a great big mess in the process. No doubt she’s sick to death of this kind of stupidity, and the realisation makes Berlin feel very small. It makes her feel worthless, like she doesn’t deserve the time she’s wasting, time that never belonged to her in the first place.

She opens her mouth to answer the question, _‘yes’_ or _‘no’_ or any word she can get out, anything that might get Amanda to leave her alone… but all that comes out is a sob.

It’s not an answer; hell, it’s not even a damn word, but it’s enough for Amanda. She doesn’t move at all, but the rhythm of her hand changes ever so slightly, shifting from strong and steady to sad and sympathetic. It’s not much of a distinction but Berlin recognises it even with a face full of pillows, and it makes her want to suffocate herself.

She doesn’t, though, and not just because Amanda’s sitting right there. She doesn’t because she’s too busy choking back more sobs and she doesn’t have the strength to do two things at once.

“Okay.” Amanda’s voice is oddly distant, like there’s a whole galaxy’s worth of space between them. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

But it’s not, is it? It’s not okay. This room isn’t okay, these pillows aren’t okay, the boat-rocking bed is not okay, and Berlin is definitely not okay. _Nothing_ is okay, and going by the way she’s feeling right now it might never be okay again. 

But there’s Amanda, like she doesn’t realise any of that, like she doesn’t know. She’s sitting there like she really believes the shtak she’s spewing, one hand on her back and the other on the bed, with her voice so soft and so far away, saying _“okay”_ over and over and over, like she can turn it into the truth if she says it enough times. She can’t, though, can she? So what’s the point in saying it? How the hell is it supposed to make any of this better?

Berlin chokes again, tries to force back the pain, but she’s got more tears than breath now and she can’t fight one without the other.

The pillow doesn’t muffle the next sob, or the half-dozen that come after it, but she holds her head down just the same, lets herself imagine that she really will suffocate if she keeps it buried for long enough.

She doesn’t, of course. Amanda, with all her strength and softness and compassion, won’t allow it.

She doesn’t resist when Amanda pulls her upright. She couldn’t, even if she wanted to; the sobs are shaking through her whole body, great heaving gasping things that take up all her strength, and she doesn’t even try to fight her off. As she’s already discovered tonight, Amanda is incredibly strong; her muscles are deceptively tight, pressing on Berlin’s sides, her back, her shoulders. Besides, even if she did have the strength to resist, no doubt her struggles would be so dampened by booze and grief that she wouldn’t stand a chance anyway. Amanda has her, hopeless and helpless, and they both know it. She pulls her close, holds her tight, and Berlin can’t do anything but allow it, wracking both of their bodies with shudders that won’t stop.

“It’s okay,” Amanda says, again and again and again until Berlin can’t take it any more.

She shakes her head, face pressed to the crook of Amanda’s neck, warm skin soaking up the tears like it’s her place to clean up Berlin’s mess, like she owes her anything. She’s too damn soft, too damn tender, and Berlin wants to say _‘no,’_ wants to scream and shout and shove her away, wants to strangle that tenderness out of her, but she can’t. Her face is wet and cold, tears soaking through the stitches under her eye, the bruises swelling at her cheek and turning her jaw purple-blue, all the reminders of the hell she’s been through, of how close she came to being really truly dead, to being in the same place Tommy is right now.

 _‘It’s not okay,’_ she tries to say, but the words don’t make it out of her throat. They never had a chance.

She sobs until there’s nothing left in her at all, until she has to stop sobbing or else she’ll stop breathing completely, until the room is spinning so hard and so fast that she can’t stay upright, until not even Amanda is strong enough to hold her up. Her body pitches, falling sideways, and then she’s slumped on the bed again, groaning and swallowing salt, burying her face in those stupid satin sheets, those stupid feather pillows, blocking out the dizziness and the delirium, blocking out the tears stinging her swollen lip and the acid burning in her throat, blocking out everything that hurts, everything she can’t drive away, blocking out the whole damn world until there’s nothing left but a sick swirling haze and the certainty that nothing will ever, ever be okay again.

The bed jostles again, a sharp sort of ripple that goes straight through her body. It reminds her of getting shot, the jump and the shudder and the split-second numbness before the pain hits. It reminds of Camp Reverie too, of the endless moment before the shots, of waiting and waiting for a shock that never came, of the scream of bullets and death and the half-frozen ground turned to corpses at her feet. It reminds her of being shot, and it reminds her of _not_ being shot, and oh god she knows which is worse.

The panic churns in her stomach, soaks her skin with sweat, and she throws out an arm almost without thinking, groping blindly for something solid, something real.

“Take it easy…”

Amanda again. There’s a smile in her voice, unbearably tender, but it trembles a little just like her fingers when she finds Berlin’s flailing hand and squeezes tight. Berlin squints her eyes open, tries to find her face, but her vision won’t focus and her head is spinning too damn hard to try. She’s as blind with her eyes open as she ever was with them closed.

“Don’t,” she chokes out, fumbling with her voice as well as her fingertips.

It’s the first word she’s managed in what feels like hours, but this time at least it works. Amanda stops moving almost immediately, and the bed along with her; Berlin doesn’t need to see either of their faces to figure out what they look like right now, and it brings her more comfort than she wants to admit to let her eyes roll back in her head and imagine the way Amanda must be staring at her.

“Take it easy,” Amanda says again. She’s holding Berlin’s hand very tightly now, probably to keep her from flailing again and inevitably injuring one of them. “I’m right here.”

Berlin swallows hard. Her throat hurts and so does her jaw, but she has to make her voice work, has to get the words out.

“Don’t,” she manages again, but of course it’s not nearly enough. _‘Don’t’_ could mean a hundred things, but she only means one. “Stay?”

It makes her sound like a child, a whimpering little infant scared of monsters under the bed, not a high-ranking soldier in the Earth Republic, and of course it makes Amanda sigh. She doesn’t sound as frustrated as Berlin expects, though she’s not nearly as sympathetic as she was a moment ago either. There’s no _‘okay’_ in that sigh, and very little tenderness too; she mostly just sounds tired, like she’s been planning her escape from the instant she dropped Berlin on the bed but doesn’t know how to say so, doesn’t have the heart to just run off and leave someone so obviously vulnerable. It’s a simple sound, that sigh, but it lodges in Berlin’s chest like shrapnel, sharp and painful in a way she can’t really understand, a way that doesn’t make any sense at all.

“Berlin.” She says it very slowly, deliberately, like the name is a reminder of the person still inside of her somewhere beneath all the booze and the tears and the rest of it, the intelligent and resourceful E-Rep soldier who should be so much better than she is right now.

A dozen drinks ago, it might have worked. Maybe not completely, not after the day and night she’s had, but enough to pull her together, enough to get her through the night. Not now, though. Berlin can’t see anything at all right now, least of all herself. She doesn’t remember the version of herself that could shrug off a few too many without a second thought, the version of herself that could go to hell and back again and still come out grinning on the other side, the propagandist who could put a positive spin on the worst things a soldier could endure and the worst things they could do. She knows it’s still there somewhere, that version of herself, knows that she’d be dead if it wasn’t, but it feels so far away right now that it might as well be another person entirely.

“Please.” It’s a whisper, in a voice that doesn’t sound like her at all.

She doesn’t say _‘Tommy,’_ doesn’t say _‘Camp Reverie.’_ She doesn’t say that he’s dead and that she almost died too; she doesn’t say that she can’t even breathe without help, that she’s broken and grieving and lost. Even if she wanted to say those things, she couldn’t. She’s not that strong. Not this version of her, and maybe not the other one either.

It’s enough, though, that worthless wasted _“please,”_ and the bed dips again as Amanda sits back down, another sigh rippling through them both like a different kind of gunshot, like a tranq instead of a bullet.

“All right.” Amanda’s voice is a breath, surprisingly close to her ear. “All right, okay. If that’s what you need.” Berlin tries to look up, to find her, but she can’t move; it’s like the words have left her paralysed, helpless and drowning in the dark. “I’m sure they can get along without me for one night. We did save the world, after all.”

Berlin presses her nose to the pillow, breathes in the perfume until she almost gags. “Did we?”

It’s a rhetorical question. She knows the answer, of course; if they hadn’t, they’d all be dead. They wouldn’t be here, the two of them, doing this. Berlin wouldn’t be lying here, choking on prostitutes’ perfume and wishing she’d been shot full of bullets in Camp Reverie, and Amanda wouldn’t be rubbing her back and saying _“it’s okay”_ and wishing she was somewhere else. They’d both be dead, just like Tommy and all the others, and everything would be so much easier. Knowing the answer makes her wish she didn’t.

Still, Amanda says the words aloud, no doubt because she thinks the question was a genuine one. A fair assumption, Berlin supposes; she’s not exactly in any condition to deliberately play dumb.

“Yeah.” Her palm is warm against her back, sticky even through her shirt; it makes Berlin’s skin flare with pain, like the pinpricks of a fever or the throb of an infected wound. “Yeah, we did.”

Berlin squeezes her eyes shut. “I wish we hadn’t.”

Amanda sighs again. “That’s the booze talking,” she says. “You’ll feel differently in the morning.”

Berlin desperately hopes that’s true.

—

It’s not.

She tosses and turns through the night, drifting in and out of nightmares about Camp Reverie, about being lined up in the middle of the night in endless swirling darkness, about firing squads made up of her family and Tommy and everyone she ever let herself care about, everyone who died too soon while she survived to mourn and wonder why. She wakes a dozen times or more, drenched with sweat and damn near delirious, and it’s only Amanda’s hands that soothe her back to sleep, only Amanda’s breath on her neck and her sleepy mumbled placations that keep her from drowning in the horror of waking up alive.

It’s a bad night, and a bad morning that follows.

She’s at least mostly coherent when she wakes for good, but that’s about the only good thing she has to say about herself. Beyond the pain, beyond the grief and the guilt and the horror of still being here, there’s the goddamn hangover, and that would be enough to floor her even on a good day. Her mouth tastes like hell, and her head’s pounding like someone set up a DJ booth directly behind her eyes, like they’re spinning old-world death metal on an endlessly repeating loop right inside her brain. Her stomach’s even worse, a writhing churning mess that threatens to turn itself inside-out if she even thinks about doing more than breathing, and her muscles are a knot of pain. Her vision’s shot, and her balance too. Every part of her, basically, or at least every part she’d need if she wanted to move.

She doesn’t, obviously. Hell, at this point, it’s taking everything she has just to keep from passing out.

Amanda’s curled up behind her, open-mouthed and snoring; Berlin can feel the warmth and weight pressed against her back, and if there was anything left in her to feel anything beyond awful she might take a moment to feel guilty for that as well. She doesn’t remember very much from last night; leaving the bar is a blur of walking into walls and Amanda’s strong arms, and everything that came after is an indistinct haze of salt and pain. She remembers flailing, though, remembers feeling small and worthless and so damn scared, remembers sobbing and shuddering and begging Amanda to stay.

It takes more effort than she’d ever admit to roll over and look at her. She’s on her side, one hand thrown across Berlin’s hip to keep her close and the other tucked beneath the pillow; she’s clearly exhausted, and Berlin tries not to think about what she must have put her through, the countless ways she must have kept her up all night with her tears and her night terrors, with her liquor-addled vertigo and her nightmare-fuelled whimpers, all that waking and shaking and wailing, all those things a goddamn E-Rep soldier should be able to handle on her own.

She doesn’t sit up. Even if she wanted to, she’s at least eighty per cent sure she can’t.

Most of last night might be a blur, but the stuff that came before is as clear as crystal, and thinking of them makes the nausea twist all the more powerfully in her stomach. Tommy, dead. The whole of New York City, dead. Half the inmates at Camp Reverie, dead. Her and Rafe McCawley, Amanda and all the rest, alive but at what cost?

She can still taste the fear on her tongue, the tang of blood thick and bitter from a blow to the head, the impossible moment that her own E-Rep brother turned on her. She still can’t believe it happened, still can’t make it make sense, and it hurts worse than the gash his gun ripped open, worse than the bruises on her cheek and her ribs, worse than the humiliation of almost dying but still not quite managing it.

She remembers how it felt, that awful moment when it all turned upside-down. She remembers the ground pitching and tilting underneath her, remembers Rafe McCawley standing at her side, strong and steady and so impossibly calm, remembers how long it seemed to last, that endless awful moment before the gunshots, before the explosions and the chaos, before they didn’t die and her E-Rep brothers did.

She wants to be sick. She’s pretty sure she was, back then, but it was all so chaotic it’s hard to know for certain. Hard to know anything for sure, at least beyond the basic facts, body counts and bullet holes. Her brain damn near shut itself down, and the rest of her definitely did. Even now, she has no idea how the hell she made it back to Defiance in one piece, how the hell she made it back to the bar under her own power. There’s a huge hole inside of her, a great big wall of nothing and nonsense, the sound of screaming shrapnel and the impossibility of her thundering heartbeat. The only thing she knows for sure is that she’s here now, and so is Amanda.

The booze is still gurgling inside of her, still turning her insides to paste, and she blames that for the way she curls up on her side, the way she buries her face in Amanda’s clothes, breathes in until she chases away the worst of the headache, the worst of the nausea and the awful feeling, the worst parts of her memory, the things she remembers that won’t disappear and won’t ever change. It doesn’t matter how hard she tries or how much she drinks; some things, she can’t block out.

Amanda doesn’t wake immediately, but she moves in rhythm with Berlin, pulling her a little closer and holding her tight. It’s automatic, Berlin can tell, like a reflex, and she wonders how many times this must have happened in the night, that she can do it now without even waking.

She doesn’t cry. Her face feels raw, the pain on one side and the crack of mostly-dried tears on the other. She can hardly move it at all, much less crumple it up and start sobbing again. It’s probably for the best, honestly; if she cries now, she’ll wake Amanda, and she doesn’t want that. She’s caused more than enough trouble already.

It’s hard not to think, but it’s a little easier when Amanda’s there, when her breath is tickling against her skin, when her body is strong and still and warm, when her features are calm, when she’s holding her like she can protect her from everything, from other people’s deaths and her own survival. Berlin’s head feels fit to explode, but it’s easier to ride out the waves when she’s wrapped up in Amanda’s arms, surrounded by all the silks and finery that the NeedWant has to offer, all the things she never even knew existed before she came to this shtakhole town, before she settled down and started living, before—

_Tommy._

She still doesn’t cry, but the choked-off moan brings Amanda back to life. A sigh, a stretch, and a fluttering of eyelashes, and then she’s there, right there with her, hazy and half-lidded and summoning a smile.

“Morning,” she says, and the simplicity shatters Berlin’s heart.

She tries to say it back, _‘good morning’_ or _‘did you sleep well?’_ or any one of a thousand things that people are supposed to say to each other after an awkward night like this, but it refuses to come out.

What does come out, desperate and devastated, is “Tommy’s dead.”

Amanda’s whole body softens, like Tommy’s death is some kind of password, a switch to turn off all that strength, to turn all those lean muscles into something gentler, to make Amanda tender like she was last night, like she always is when someone needs her. She holds Berlin tight, cheek morning-hot against the curve of her temple, her forehead, against all the parts of Berlin that hurt, the parts that wish they were dead too.

“I know.” Her voice is rough. “I know he is. And I am so, so sorry.”

Berlin doesn’t cry. Won’t cry. Can’t cry. Everything hurts — her face, her heart, every part of her that’s still breathing, that’s still alive — but she doesn’t have enough left in her for that. The perfect feathery pillow is soaked with salt, the sheets crumpled and wrung out with her tears, but there are none left inside of her.

They lie there, tangled together, for a very long time. It’s thoughtful, the way Amanda doesn’t say anything; she doesn’t point out that she has a hundred other things to do, that she’s a businesswoman with a business that won’t run itself, that there’s a bar and a brothel waiting downstairs and a good dozen still-drunk patrons who probably never made it back to their beds last night. She doesn’t say that Berlin has her own job to get to, that there’s a whole damn town out there full of chaos to put right. She doesn’t say that saving the world means cleaning up its mess and that they both need to get on it as quickly as possible. It’s sweet, maybe a little too much, the way she keeps that all to herself, the way she lets Berlin lie there as long as she needs.

Berlin wishes she didn’t need it at all. She wishes she was stronger, tougher, wishes she could be a proper soldier again, but her uniform is as crumpled as the sheets and she’s never been very good at smoothing out creases.

It feels like hours before she trusts herself to say anything, before she has the strength to even try. She wants to say _‘thank you’_ or _‘you can go if you want,’_ or any one of a thousand things she knows she should say. She wants to turn the lens on Amanda instead of herself, wants to keep the spotlight away from the bruises on her face and the shrapnel that missed her heart. She wants to do a lot of things, needs to do a lot of things, but she’s not strong enough to even try, and when she does finally dig down deep and find the capacity for words, once again the ones that come out are a million miles away from the ones she was searching for.

“I nearly died too.”

Amanda stiffens, and sits up. The surprise is obvious, even to a grief-numb and hangover-crippled E-Rep soldier. Apparently she hasn’t heard about Reverie.

“What?” she manages after a moment.

Berlin tries to explain. _There were riots. Firing squads. People were getting lined up and shot for being scared, and when I tried to stop it, the people who are my family turned around and lined me up too._ It feels so important, though she doesn’t really know why, that Amanda understands her part in all of that, that she realises Berlin at least tried to do the right thing. It feels so damn important than Amanda understand she wasn’t the bad guy, not this time. It matters that she knows all of that. It matters that she still believes Berlin is worth spending a night with, that she’s worth something.

It’s important, yes, but it’s too many words. Too many feelings, too much fear and pain, and when she tries to say _‘firing squad’_ her voice breaks beyond recognition.

Amanda tugs at her shoulder, gentle but insistent, and keeps going until Berlin manages to get herself upright. “Hey,” she says, an encouragement and an offer of support if she needs it. “Berlin?”

“Tommy’s dead.” It’s all she can say. It’s not enough, and she hates that, but it’s the only thing she has. Her eyes are wet, stinging, but she still can’t cry. “Tommy’s dead, and I’m not.”

She doesn’t understand. No matter how many times she says the words, how many times she runs it over and over in her head, his body lying motionless, her tears soaking through his uniform, the uniform she picked out for him, Nolan’s shoulders hunched and haunted as he slinks away and leaves them alone… no matter how many times she remembers, it doesn’t make sense.

Tommy was the sweetest, kindest person in the whole wide world. A lifetime of hard living and hard people, of destruction and disappointment, and there he was with that damn smile, that damn cock-eyed optimism, the way he held her and touched her; he was the softest person she’d ever met, so far away from all of that hardness, and being with him let her pretend that maybe she wasn’t hard too, that maybe she was worth being soft for. He was the last person in the universe who deserved something like this. Stabbed to death by his spaceship-possessed ex-girlfriend in the middle of nowhere. No-one deserves shtak like that, but no-one deserved it less than him. He deserved more, deserved better.

Meanwhile, Berlin, who doesn’t deserve anything, stared down a firing squad and lived.

 _It’s not fair,_ she thinks, but the words don’t make it to her lips. _Nothing is fair._

“I’m sorry,” Amanda’s saying. It’s pretty obvious that she still doesn’t really understand, but she knows better than to push someone this fragile, this close to shattering completely. Besides, she’s a bartender; she knows how to fake it. “I know how you feel. Believe me, I know.”

Berlin knows it’s true. She does, but she can’t bring herself to care.

She doesn’t say _‘it should have been me.’_ She doesn’t say _‘I wish it had been.’_ She says “Thank you for staying with me last night,” and forces back tears she wouldn’t have the strength to shed anyway.

Amanda hugs her, very hard. “Anything you need.”

Berlin buries her face in her neck, breathes in liquor and sweet perfume, and pretends she doesn’t need anything.

—

Walking is difficult. Walking in a straight line is damn near impossible.

She leaves Amanda at the NeedWant, more out of stubborn pride and not-so-well-hidden shame than anything else, and of course she regrets that decision almost instantly. Without help, it feels like forever before she gets back to her little corner of the E-Rep barracks, and the journey is exhausting beyond words.

She keeps her eyes on the ground, watches it blurring and swerving under her, focuses on putting one foot in front of the other and not falling over. It’s hard not to look up; she’s so sure that everyone’s looking at her, that they’re all staring and judging, cutting through the gash on her cheek, the bruises on her face, the haunted hollow look in her eyes, cutting through all the parts of her that have suffered and seeing the parts that deserved to suffer so much more, the parts that are still alive and shouldn’t be.

Getting changed is difficult too, once she makes it back home. Her shirt is sticking to her skin, crumpled from the night before and stained almost beyond recognition with dirt and sweat and tears; it smells like fear and death, like Camp Reverie, like the booze and smoke of the NeedWant. It smells of Amanda too, a little bit, and that’s about the only part she misses when she strips down and tosses the damn thing aside.

She stands in front of the mirror, studies her reflection, and hates every line she sees.

It’s a soldier’s body, the shape that stares back at her, but it doesn’t feel like it belongs to her. She recognises everything, remembers winning every scar, every break in the skin; she knows it as intimately as she’s ever known anyone or anything, but it’s not _her_. It’s someone else, someone strong, or at least someone who knew how to pretend she was strong. It’s a Berlin who laughed when they gave her that nickname, a Berlin who embraced it for what it was, who gave similar stupid nicknames to her bullet wounds and stretch marks, to the tangles of sinew sprawling across her skin. It’s a Berlin who could stare at the screaming eagle tattooed on her shoulder and relive with perfect clarity the proudest day of her life, a Berlin who could still taste the triumph of her first promotion, her second, her third. It’s a Berlin who knew who she was, and it is definitely not her.

She presses her fingertips to the skin, finds the old scar-pale places, signposts of a life lived bravely. She traces the lines, the scattered little spots where shrapnel buried itself a bit too deep, where harmless bullet-grazes healed badly, where the bad moments left their marks on the good. She turns and squints at the eagle too, etched under the skin in half-faded colours, a symbol that says _home_ and _family_ , that says _courage_ and _strength_ and all those things that should mean more than they do; she tries to study it, to remember all those meanings, but the lines are blurry and indistinct. She traces the shapes over and over, the scars, the ink, the sinew, every part of her that’s unique, every colour carrying its own private name. She remembers Tommy tracing them with his lips, and the long-healed scars hurt more now than they ever did when they were bleeding.

Putting on a clean uniform doesn’t make her feel any cleaner. It makes her feel like a liar, a traitor, like the clothes she’s wearing are not really hers any more than the face staring back from the mirror, like she’s pretending to be someone she’s not, maybe one of the nameless corpses rotting in the ground back at Reverie. It makes her feel like a criminal, like one of those worthless assholes who search dead bodies for scrip or weapons, like she’s turning Tommy’s memory into something sordid, something to make herself feel better. It doesn’t matter that he’ll never see her like this, that he’ll never know. She knows.

Back outside, still swaying on her feet, she dares to look up at the sky for the first time. There’s no alien lights up there now, no portents of impending doom. There’s nothing there at all, just a few heavy clouds and the perpetual threat of rain. Crazy, how quickly things can go back to normal, how all that weirdness can just undo itself like it was never there at all, like the world was never in danger. It’s so cheap, as if everything really can go back to normal just because the threat’s been neutralised, and the sight of people bustling out on the streets, milling around and gossiping and acting like everything’s exactly the same as it always was, makes her feel so sick she can’t stand it. Not sick like too much to drink, like the sobs in her throat souring to spasms in her stomach, but sick like broken, sick like twisted. Sick like _wrong_.

She doesn’t know what to do with herself. If there’s a specific E-Rep protocol for _We Just Saved The World_ , she doesn’t know what it is. If there’s a protocol for a soldier who lost her sort-of-ex-sort-of-not-ex-boyfriend to a machine-controlled alien hell-bent on terraforming the planet, she doesn’t know that either. Honestly, she doesn’t know shtak about any of the places life has dumped her out this morning.

The one thing she does know is that she has to do something. She has to make this uniform mean something.

After about ten minutes’ worth of awkward deliberation, she heads for Pottinger’s office. It makes sense, firstly because he’s her boss and she’ll have to report to him eventually anyway, secondly because he’ll no doubt have some brilliant idea for post-world-saving footage she can shoot to make herself feel useful, and thirdly (probably most importantly) because it’s about the only building close enough that she can get there by herself without falling over.

It helps. Thinking of things that make sense, having a destination. Not falling over. It helps her to feel almost human.

Small surprise, then, that the feeling vanishes about twenty seconds after she arrives.

She hears the voices before she even enters the room, and that’s enough to gauge the temperature she’ll find inside. Pottinger and Mercado, on opposite sides of the room as well as whatever they’re arguing about; they’re both trying to prove that their side is more important, or maybe just trying to prove that their voice is louder. Berlin can’t make out the words, though of course she doesn’t have to; this kind of bureaucratic bullshtak is par for the course among high-ranking types, and it’s hardly the first time Pottinger’s rubbed Mercado the wrong way. Not the first time Mercado’s done the same right back, either, but he’s the one with the bigger hat so at least he can claim he has the right to do whatever the hell he wants.

She lingers outside the door for a few moments, hesitating not because the echoes of raised voices are giving her second thoughts but because they’re giving her another damn headache. Whatever the hell they’re fighting about, she’s at least eighty per cent sure that putting herself in the middle of it, at least in her present state, will only lead to pain and suffering for everyone.

Shame it’s not her decision, then.

When she finally does find the courage to throw open the door and step inside, the shouting stops immediately and they whirl around like they’ve been caught with their pants down. Whether or not they were expecting someone else, they sure as hell weren’t expecting her, and going by the looks on their faces it’s pretty clear that she’s just walked in on something she doesn’t have clearance to hear.

 _Shtak_ , she thinks, and she’s just about to choke out an apology when Pottinger cuts her off.

“Berlin.”

It takes her by surprise, the sobriety in his voice. There’s something very unpleasant hidden in there somewhere, a warning or a confrontation, or possibly both, and it sets off another round of churning in her stomach.

“Sir.” She keeps her voice steady by sheer force of will, then turns to Mercado. “Sir.”

Mercado looks her up and down. Unlike Pottinger, he doesn’t even try to be subtle about his feelings. “Captain,” he grunts, and Berlin is pretty sure she’s never heard so much derision crammed into two little syllables in her entire life. “I trust you’re in command of your faculties this morning?”

She flashes back to their last encounter, her wavering on her feet and reeking of liquor, him in the throes of a planet-wide crisis; it wasn’t exactly her finest moment, and no, she was unequivocally _not_ in command her faculties.

She thinks about playing the honesty card here as well, saying _‘no’_ and facing whatever consequences he feels like dishing out. She’s used up all her courage just stumbling through the door, though, and in any event whatever’s going on in here is clearly more important than her hangover. As long as she can keep herself upright and keep her insides on the inside, surely that’s enough for now.

“Yes, sir,” she says, and decides that she’ll be just fine so long as they let her stick to single-syllable words.

“Glad to hear it,” Pottinger says, a little too quickly.

He doesn’t sound glad, though; on the contrary, he sounds like he’s trying to prepare her for something unspeakably awful. Berlin almost laughs out loud at the idea that she would need preparing for anything at this point.

“Indeed.” Mercado sounds mildly annoyed by the interruption, but he softens just a little when he turns back to Pottinger. “Well, then. Might as well get it over with, eh Niles? No sense in dragging out the inevitable.”

He’s looking at Pottinger like a side of meat, looking at her like a particularly illegible missing briefing. Berlin has a horrible suspicion that she knows where this is heading.

Pottinger, for his part, is already wincing and stammering. “With respect, I hardly think this is the appropriate time…”

Mercado huffs. It’s like a laugh, but not, like something bitter drenched in something sweet. “Oh, I’m sure you don’t,” he says. “I suppose you’re hoping to sneak away before you have to drop the noose, no doubt claiming some kind of ‘mayoral emergency’ and leaving me to do it for you?” He takes great and obvious pleasure in shaking his head. “As much as I admire your chutzpah, old boy…”

Pottinger actually has the decency to look abashed. It’s more than Berlin would have expected of him, and that’s kind of worrying in itself. He grimaces again, clears his throat, and when he turns back to Berlin he’s wearing a sort of trapped-animal helplessness on his face, like he can make this easier if he looks suitably apologetic about it.

Berlin is feeling very, very sick now. She’s at least ninety per cent certain that she knows what’s coming now — and _why_ — and it damn near rips her heart out even before she hears the words. She’s worked with Niles Pottinger for a good long while now, and given the nature of her job it’s to be expected that she’d learn the nuances of his behaviour. Every detail, every tic or twitch is an open book to someone like Berlin, who has spent so much of her life behind a lens; as hard as he tries to hold a poker face, he might as well be screaming the truth to the heavens for all the good it does.

So, then. Because she can’t stand to see him snivelling, she puts him out of his misery. “Is this about what happened at Camp Reverie?”

They both stare at her. Pottinger looks dazed, like he’s been struck a physical blow, while Mercado just looks empty. It’s an odd expression, but one that Berlin recognises all too well; it’s the kind of look that says _‘officially, we have no idea what you’re talking about,’_ while at the same time winking and smiling and sliding scrip chips under the table.

That would make it a _yes_ , then, but not one she’ll ever get to hear. Somehow, that stings more than what comes next.

“Captain.” Pottinger is trying so damn hard to be gentle. No doubt he thought he’d get the chance to do this in private, with a cup of tea and a firm handshake. Shame on him for being so damn naive, Berlin thinks and doesn’t care that she’s being unfair, that this isn’t his fault any more than it’s hers. “The Earth Republic thanks you for your service.”

 _Oh, I’ll bet it does,_ Berlin thinks, bitter and angry and dangerously close to tears. _I guess this is what being a scapegoat feels like._

“That’s not an answer.” Her voice catches, but she refuses to let it break. “Sir.”

Mercado fixes her with a sober, serious look. “No,” he says. “It’s not.”

Berlin bites down on her tongue, grinds her heels into the carpet. She wants to scream and shout, to make a scene if that’s how it has to be, to make damn sure they know she’s going down swinging. She wants to yell it out the window, tell everyone in this shtakhole of a town that it’s not what they say, that she wasn’t responsible, that she tried to stop it.

Who’d believe her if she did, though? Who the hell would back her up? Reverie was a mess, a bloodbath of unnecessary deaths and unnecessary paperwork; someone has to take the fall for the dozens of corpses and dozens of escaped convicts, for the soldiers’ bodies piled up right next to their victims. Someone has to be held accountable for everything that happened there, the bad decisions and terrible deeds, and isn’t it just a crying shame that the guilty parties are already dead? Isn’t it just a damn crying shame that the only living witnesses are criminals, on the lam and scattered to the winds?

Still, pointless as she knows it is, she won’t let them string her up without a fight. “I didn’t do anything.”

She doesn’t say _‘they almost executed me.’_ She doesn’t say _‘I was almost dead’_ or _‘you should be burning my body with the rest of them.’_ None of that seems nearly as important as _“I didn’t do anything.”_

“Nobody said that you did,” Mercado points out, as calm and calculated as anyone Berlin’s ever met.

Because, yeah. That’s exactly the chupping point, isn’t it? He’s not accusing her of anything, not out loud. He doesn’t want to clean up that mess any more than she wants to become it, but he has to do something, has to make a show of sweeping this shtako under the carpet, and he’s making the subtext real clear to a practiced propagandist like Berlin. He knows his audience as well as she knows hers, and he knows that she’ll pick up all those words he’s not saying, all those words that neither of them can say in a place where people might be listening.

 _‘Nobody’s said anything yet,’_ he’s not saying. _‘And if you keep your mouth shut and walk away like a good little girl, we won’t have to.’_

That’s the crux of it, the great big axe swinging closer and closer to her neck. They’ll let her go quietly, or at least without hanging her, and Reverie and all its deaths will neatly and conveniently disappear into the ether. It makes her wonder how many other screw-ups like this have vanished without a trace, how much more blood her family has on its hands that she never knew about.

It’s awful, brutal, but what the hell is she supposed to do? They’re offering the closest thing to a stalemate that she can reasonably hope for, a way out of this with no warrant for her arrest. Mercado’s holding all the damn cards, and he’s got a gun to her head as well. _Take it, or we blow your brains out instead, and call that justice._ Given the hell she’s been through over the last couple of days, Berlin can’t deny a fate like that has its appeal. But of course, that would let him win, and for all that she’s more than willing to give up and drop down dead right now, she’s never quite been able to let someone else beat her.

Besides, being a conveniently-fired scapegoat is a hell of a lot better than the other alternative: that he won’t kill her at all, just sent her straight back to Reverie as a damn prisoner. He could do that, and a hell of a lot worse too, if she only gave him a reason, and all three of them know it.

Pottinger isn’t looking at her. To his credit, he’s not looking at Mercado either, but then he’s not holding Mercado’s balls in his hand, is he? He’s not stripping Mercado of his rank, of his damn job, of everything that ever meant anything to him; he’s not crushing Mercado under his boot with a few short words, a forced smile and an inevitable handshake. Mercado’s pulling his strings, sure, but he’s not the one Pottinger owes. That’s Berlin, and it makes her sick to see him looking around the room like the carpet can save him, like the walls will do all the dirty work if he asks them nicely enough, like the goddamn desk can shield him from the embarrassment of everything that’s happening. It makes her sick, but worse than that it makes her so angry she can’t see.

“So that’s it?” she manages at last, and hates that she sounds as wretched as she feels. “I’m out? I’m finished?”

Mercado looks at Pottinger.

Pottinger stares at the specks of dust on his lapel. “You have to understand…” he starts weakly.

Berlin does understand, of course. She understands entirely too well.

She doesn’t say that, though. She’s not sure she could, even if she wanted to. It’s taking everything she has just to stay upright just now, everything she has to keep from falling to her knees and losing either consciousness or what’s left of last night’s booze; neither reaction would be particularly unwelcome right now, and god knows they’d both be more than a little understandable, but they’d also go a long way to proving Mercado right, proving that she’s not worth the uniform she wears, the titles she’s earned, the career and the home and the family that took half her damn life to make and build and find.

They don’t deserve to see that. They don’t deserve to see her lose anything. They’ve taken enough from her already, and at the very moment when she was so damn sure she had nothing left. She never thought it would hurt so much to be wrong.

Mercado’s sneer is sinister. “You have three days to make the necessary arrangements.” The sudden lift in his tone makes it obvious that he’s speaking to Pottinger, but of course he doesn’t take his eyes off Berlin. “Given the situation in what’s left of New York, I’d say that’s more than fair. Wouldn’t you agree, Captai—” He chuckles, calculated and impossibly cruel. “Ah, but I forget myself.”

At long last, Pottinger meets her eye. “Berlin…” he says, like the name still belongs to her, like his goddamn eye-contact means anything now.

Berlin swallows hard. The room’s spinning around her. “May I be excused?”

“Of course.” He tries to smile, but the expression doesn’t come. “Dismissed.”

And just like that, she is.

—


	2. Chapter 2

—

She pukes her guts out in the alley behind Pottinger’s office, then punches the walls until her knuckles are a mess of blood.

It doesn’t help. None of it helps, not even a little bit. The world is still spinning, her head still feels like it’s going to explode, and nothing has changed at all; all she’s got from this is a sour taste in her mouth, a sore throat, and the certainty that she’s broken at least two fingers. The only thing she’ll leave behind are the stains on the wall, different but equally stark, a graphic memo to anyone who passes by, a story without words. _‘Someone was here,’_ it says. _‘Someone came out here when they were hurting and miserable and had nowhere else to go.’_

She wonders if they’ll feel sorry for her, those imaginary passers-by who stop to mark the signs of her suffering. She hopes they don’t. She doesn’t want their pity, and she sure as hell doesn’t deserve it.

The ground lurches underneath her when she tries to walk, roads and sidewalks blurring and blending into something she can’t navigate at all. That’s probably more from the shock than the hangover, to be honest; she can blame the booze for the acid in her mouth and the headache, sure, but the rest is a different feeling entirely. The way she can’t think, the way she can’t see, the way she’s one breath away from sobbing or screaming… there’s nothing liquor-addled in any of that. It’s all just her, and Mercado’s sinister sneer burned into her brain.

It’s a strange feeling, like being numb and feeling too much at the same time, like her whole self is raw and cut open, like there’s too much going on inside of her to feel it all, like she wants to shut down but can’t remember how. She’s stumbling, tripping and falling over any solid surface that gets in her way, walls and trash cans and market stalls, probably even a few of those bystanders she let herself wonder about. Stumbling, tripping, falling, and if anyone offers to help or asks if she’s okay she doesn’t hear a word of it.

She staggers through the door of the NeedWant, and collapses against the bar. Her mouth twists open to order a drink she’s never had in her life, something strong and with a name she can’t pronounce. The words die strangled in her throat, though, not that it matters; no-one in their right mind would serve her anyway.

It’s hard to make out anything through the tears blurring her vision, hard to see at all through the pain and rage and grief, but she recognises the bartender, Bailey. The poor woman has been serving her pretty must non-stop over the last couple days; she was there after Tommy, and again after Reverie, and there’s no mistaking the way her face twists into a rictus of compassion at the sight of her again now, the unvoiced question — _‘dear lord, what’s happened now?’_ — hovering on the air between them. Funny, how she doesn’t even look surprised any more.

It still hurts, though. The sympathy on her face is devastating, like she doesn’t need to ask the question to know the answer, to know all the sordid details, like she can see every ounce of the pain Berlin’s carrying just by looking at her face. It lances her chest like a charge-blade, the way she’s so visible.

“You all right there, Captain?”

The question lashes, sharp and keen. Berlin tries to laugh, to shrug off the cruelty with carelessness, but all that comes out is a pathetic little choking sound. _Captain,_ she thinks, and says “Not any more.”

“I see…” Bailey murmurs, frowning at the oblique response.

Berlin shakes her head, fights back a wave of dizziness.

“No,” she says. “You don’t.”

She must see something, though, even if it’s not the right thing, because she nods and slinks away without another word, leaving Berlin alone and without a drink. Fair enough, she supposes; her heart wasn’t exactly in it, and she’s not entirely sure she could keep anything down anyway. In any event, she’s only here in the first place because she has nowhere else to go. They can ignore her completely for all she cares; so long as they let her use the bar to hold herself upright, hold herself together, she doesn’t give a damn.

She lets her head fall forward, presses her injured cheek to the surface, and shuts her eyes. The place is quiet, all but deserted like it usually is in the daylight hours, but there’s still a little ambient noise, clinking glasses and background chatter and whatever else, just enough to distract her from the chaos in her head, the way she feels like she’s floating, like someone has pulled the whole damn world out from under her feet.

A minute, an hour, a lifetime later, strong fingers squeeze her shoulder.

She doesn’t lift her head. She couldn’t, even if she wanted to. “Amanda.”

“Back again?” Her voice is like a smile, showing teeth but keeping itself low. It makes Berlin’s stomach clench, makes her ribs squeeze her lungs until she can’t breathe. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough for one lifetime?”

Berlin tries to breathe, tries not to think. “Not drinking,” she mumbles, not that it helps much. “There a crime against sitting?”

“You tell me.” The words sound breezy enough, but Berlin’s spent enough time with Amanda to recognise the weight behind them. “You’re the soldier.”

Berlin turns her face away. “Not any more,” she says again.

Amanda doesn’t say _‘I see’_ like Bailey did. She doesn’t let go of Berlin’s shoulder either, nor does she squeeze it any tighter; point of fact, she doesn’t seem to react at all. If she genuinely had no idea, she’s incredibly talented at hiding her reaction, and if she did have her suspicions… well, that wouldn’t exactly come as a shock.

Amanda’s one of the cleverest people Berlin has ever met (not much of a compliment, given her usual choice of companions, but still), and she’s a ‘people’ person to boot. Berlin knows that she was the mayor of this town before the E-Rep came along, knows that she’s played the part more than a few times since as well, coupling her old duties in the fancy chair with her new ones here in the NeedWant. It’s an impressive resume, and one that gives her a pretty deep pool of people skills: the kind that come with running a town, the kind that come with running a bar, and the kind that come with running a brothel. Of everyone in Defiance, if there was one person who could figure out something like this from just a glance and three grunted words, it would be Amanda Rosewater.

She doesn’t ask what happened. She probably thinks it would be needlessly cruel, reopen wounds better left closed. She’d probably be right, too. Instead, all she does is sigh,a deep heavy sound that gives more than it takes. Her hair tickles the back of Berlin’s neck, gentle and ill-fitting just like her presence.

“It’s been a hell of a few days, hasn’t it?” she asks. She sounds so worn out, so damn exhausted; it makes Berlin want to cry.

 _I wish the world really had ended,_ she thinks. _Why did we have to save it?_

Out loud, she just says “Yeah,” and hopes Amanda doesn’t catch the pain.

Amanda doesn’t move, but her sighs ripple through them both like waves on a lake, like the bed shifting and bobbing with her weight last night. “What…” She clears her throat. “Uh. What do you want me to call you? Is it still ‘Berlin’, or…”

Her voice wavers, ever so slightly, like she knows this is a delicate subject, but even that isn’t enough to cushion the blow. Berlin didn’t expect it, not the question and definitely not how hard it would hit. It slams into her like a land coach going a hundred miles an hour and leaves her lying there sprawled and bloody like roadkill. She feels halfway dead, like all the air has been sucked out of her body, and she has to grip the bar really tightly to keep from falling over completely.

Because… because, yes, that _is_ a question now, isn’t it? It’s a question that people will be asking, a question that she will have to answer not just once but again and again and again every time she talks to someone new. ‘Captain Rainier’ was a soldier for the Earth Republic; she had a badge, a set of stripes, a gun and a nametag. ‘Berlin’ was a semi-fond nickname given to a filmmaker by an organisation that no longer wants or needs her. Who the hell is she now that both of those people have been tossed away? What the hell is Amanda supposed to call her? What the hell is she supposed to call _herself_?

In a pathetic sort of way, it’s kind of hilarious. It’s the simplest question in the whole damn world — _what’s your name? who are you?_ — and she has no idea how to answer it.

“I don’t know.” It comes out half-frozen, like a sob caught halfway between her chest and her throat. “I don’t…” She sits up as straight as she can. Her head is throbbing, the ache in her jaw and cheek offset by a jackhammer pounding behind her temples, but she holds herself upright by sheer force of will. “I have no chupping idea. How stupid is that?”

“It’s not stupid at all,” Amanda says gently. “It’s… honestly, given the circumstances, it’s understandable. We’ve all been through a lot.”

Berlin tries to shake her head, but it hurts too much. “They should’ve just shot me when they had the chance.” It’s as close to the truth as she’s willing to admit, as close to her feelings as she trusts Amanda to see. “It would’ve saved everyone a lot of trouble.”

Amanda doesn’t hug her. It’s pretty obvious that she wants to, but she holds back because she can tell that would cross a line Berlin’s not ready for. Instead, she keeps a respectful distance, keeps her arms close and her hands in sight. It’s an invitation, _‘I’m here if you need me, all you have to do is ask,’_ and Berlin is grateful (more for the way she respects her personal space than for the offer), even as she also wonders why she deserves it.

“You never got around to telling me what happened,” Amanda says. “You said you nearly died, but you didn’t say how or why.”

It’s meant as a kind of encouragement, Berlin can tell. Amanda’s trying to distract her from her latest crisis, give her something else to focus on, trading in a new loss, a new hurt, for an old one. She means well, but it doesn’t really work the way she wants it to. It’s just one more gut-wrenching reminder of how close she came to being dead, how close she got to being wherever Tommy is, wherever the hell dead people go. Honestly, she doesn’t much care what that place is like, so long as it’s not like here, and the last thing she needs is to think about it now, when it’s the only thing in the world she wants.

Her voice trembles when she tries to speak; it makes her sound like a coward.

“I don’t know if I’m allowed to talk about it.” It’s not an absolute lie, but it’s enough of one that she kind of earns the dubious look Amanda gives her. “People died at Camp Reverie. I didn’t.”

“Camp Reverie?” Amanda doesn’t try to hide the way the revelation makes her choke. “I’m sorry, _what_?”

Her voice is high now, pitchy and panicky, and Berlin kicks herself for not taking into account the possibility that she’d have a reaction, that she might have some personal stake in what went down in that shtakhole. In truth, she’d all but forgotten that Amanda was a sort-of friend to Rafe McCawley, had all but forgotten that she might care about what happened to him, that his freedom — hell, his survival — might actually mean something to her. That makes it a little harder to paper over the whole sordid affair, to hold her tongue and avoid thinking about it by pretending she can’t speak about it. It makes it harder because as much as she doesn’t want to hurt herself by saying the words, she also doesn’t want to hurt Amanda by keeping them inside.

“Don’t worry,” she forces out. It sounds strangled, though, and not the least bit comforting. “McCawley’s fine. He… well, uh… there was a last-minute…”

But she can’t say _‘rescue’_ or _‘reprieve’_ because it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like the opposite, like being here is a punishment, like that so-called ‘rescue’ kept her away from where she was supposed to be. Good for Rafe, sure, and good for the countless other prisoners who got out with their lives and ran away into the night, but it’s no good for Berlin, and she’s the one telling the story.

Amanda is staring at her, breathless and intense. “Berlin,” she starts, then catches herself. “Jessica.”

Berlin swallows hard. She hates that name. It makes her think of Tommy.

“McCawley’s fine,” she says again, but her voice is so thick it’s a miracle the words get out at all. “I can promise you that.”

“That’s not…” Amanda starts, but cuts herself off before she can finish. Another sigh, and then she draws back, like she knows she risks poking a beehive if she pushes this any further. “All right. Okay. He’s fine, that’s what matters.”

Berlin wants to say that they can talk about it later. Amanda has been so damn supportive, and she deserves the same in kind. Berlin wants to tell her that she’ll run her through all the gory details, that they can break it down blow-by-blow if that’s what she wants, just as soon as her head is on straight, just as soon as she can think about it without feeling the prick of tears and panic, without wishing with every last breath in her body that the Tarrs had arrived just a second or two too late. She wants to offer anything Amanda needs, anything she thinks she can use, but the words refuse to come, and she doesn’t trust herself with promises they both know she can’t keep.

“I’m sorry,” she says instead. It won’t be worth much, she knows, but for now it’s the best she has. “I really am. It’s just… I…”

But she can’t say it. She wouldn’t know how to, even if she had the strength. There aren’t words for this sort of thing, for the feeling that comes with not dying, with wishing that she had, with the way she doesn’t want to kill herself but doesn’t want to be alive either. She hates that. It’s supposed to make her more alive than ever, coming back from something like this; it’s worked that way a dozen times, after a bullet that grazed too close or a moment that got too heated. She always thrived in moments like this, the adrenaline-hot buzz of surviving, of living to fight another day, but that’s nothing like what she feels right now. She feels closer to death now than she ever did with a gun pointed at her head. How the hell is she supposed to put that into words that someone like Amanda can comprehend?

Amanda gets that she can’t talk about it. She’d probably call that ‘understandable’ too, like everything’s so damn understandable. But it’s not. And Berlin can’t tell her why.

She swallows over the lump in her throat. Her jaw aches, a pulse of pain that goes straight through her teeth, and it’s by pure reflex that she lifts a hand to clutch at the side of her face, at the slowly-fading bruises and the half-dissolved stitches. Pain lances her hand as well, a lightning bolt through her fingers that leaves her gasping and damn near blind, and the only thing that keeps her from swearing is the fact that Amanda does it on her behalf. Her eyes go wide at the sight of her knuckles, bloody and battered; she sucks in a sharp breath then lets it out in a stream of old Earth curses, and if she wasn’t so humiliated Berlin might almost have laughed at the antiquity of it.

When she recovers herself, Amanda shakes her head. “I can’t leave you alone for a minute, can I?”

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Berlin insists, flushing crimson.

“Of course it’s not.”

That doesn’t stop her hauling Berlin to her feet, though. She should have expected that, honestly, and she doesn’t even bother trying to protest; in the first she knows perfectly well that it wouldn’t do any good, and in the second the change of subject is much appreciated. This pain, at least, is self-inflicted; it’s a far cry from Camp Reverie, from the memory of Rafe McCawley’s face, the way he stood tall and strong and noble when Berlin could barely stand at all, swaying and semiconscious and dazed from a few too many blows. She remembers the pain, the dull weight under her ribs where they left her winded and then the gash blooming across her face, hot blood flowing over half-frozen skin; she remembers the roughness of soldiers’ hands shoving her into the mass of convicts, another faceless body to be buried in the morning, assuming the planet survived the night.

She stumbles, almost falls, and hates the way Amanda holds her steady. “Easy…”

Berlin turns her face away. “You don’t have to do this,” she says, and the words taste like blood in her mouth.

“I know.” Amanda’s smile is tragic, like she’s hurting too. “But I’m doing it anyway.”

—

Doc Yewll isn’t happy to see them.

That’s not really a surprise. From Berlin’s experience, Doc Yewll is seldom happy to see anyone. She’s the least doctorish doctor she has ever met, and that includes the E-Rep doc with the icy hands and an attitude to match. On another day, Berlin might have made a quip or two about the lack of bedside manner, but she doesn’t have it in her right now. Besides, it’s kind of comforting in a surreal sort of way; it feels like forever since someone treated her like a person, like she’s more than some fragile and delicate little flower, some traumatised kitten in need of coddling and protection and tenderness.

Yewll has never had that problem, of course. She takes one look at Berlin’s blood-soaked knuckles and throws up her hands. “Oh, for the love of…”

“Morning, Doc.” Amanda, ever the diplomat. She’s making a great show of playing nice, with a smile and a wave and entirely too much sweetness, but of course she might as well be talking to the wall for all the good it does her. “We, uh… there was a bit of a…”

“Yeah, yeah. Take a seat, hot stuff.” Yewll, naturally, is still locked on Berlin. “How many times do I have to tell you kids? If it’s bigger than you, stronger than you, and more solid than you…”

Berlin winces, finishes the sentence almost without thinking. “…you’re not going to beat it in a fight.”

“Gold star for Junior Flyweight. Bulk up and try again.”

Amanda swallows what looks suspiciously like a chuckle. “I take it this sort of thing happens often?”

It’s a stupid question, and it gets Berlin’s blood up. Like Amanda couldn’t figure out the answer for herself, like she doesn’t know perfectly well that the E-Rep’s reputation precedes anyone wearing a damn badge. It’s not Berlin’s fault that this town hates anyone in a uniform. It’s not her fault that they have it in for her just because she has stripes on her collar. 

_Had_ , she remembers. Not any more. It stings more than she expects, or at least more than it should given the context of idiots picking fights with her. It should mean she’ll have an easier time fitting in around here, and that should be its own kind of comforting, but it’s not. It just makes her fingers itch for another fight with people who hate her for her clothes.

“Once or twice,” she says aloud, and wishes the words would wash away the bitterness in her mouth.

“Once or twice,” Yewll echoes, sardonic. “Sure. In a slow week.”

Amanda sighs, but doesn’t comment. Berlin’s grateful for that; she’s fairly certain that the scrutiny would break her as surely as any badly-aimed punch. A few busted fingers are the least of her problems right now, and there’s a lot more than a moment’s temper in the way she’s shaking, the way her muscles twitch, the way she flinches when Yewll gets closer. It doesn’t much matter that she’s been here before, that this is far from the first time Yewll’s had to patch her up after a nasty altercation, and it doesn’t matter that she can be as violent as the rabble out on the streets when she wants to be, that she can shove her fist down someone’s throat just as happily as they can try it on her. It doesn’t matter that the situation isn’t new, because the way she’s feeling sure as hell is.

She’s never felt like this before. Not in here. This town has left her beaten, concussed, delirious and a thousand other things, but the one thing it’s never done is left her helpless. She never let it. This place, these people, they don’t have the right to hold that kind of power over her, and she’s never sat here like this before; she’s been hurt much worse, but she has never felt so wounded.

“Is this really necessary?” she hears herself ask. Her voice is wobbly, as unsteady as her legs; it sounds like it’s coming from the other side of the room, but no-one else seems to notice.

Yewll rolls her eyes. “And here I thought you enjoyed my sparkling repartee. How will my poor fragile ego ever recover?”

“I’m sure it’ll manage,” Amanda says. There’s an edge to her voice now, impatience and something close to anger. Whatever it is, Berlin can tell it has nothing to do with her fingers; going by the daggers she’s glaring at Yewll, it’s personal. “Get on with it, will you? We don’t have all day.”

“Some of us do,” Berlin says, very quietly.

Yewll shoots her a curious glance. She doesn’t ask, but of course she doesn’t need to. Knowing the way her keen mind works, she probably figured the whole thing out two seconds after they walked through the door. That, or else she just doesn’t care. Given who she is, either option is about as likely as the other, and in any case Berlin’s not exactly in the mood to shout her failures from the rooftops, so it’s probably for the best. Broken fingers or no broken fingers, she doesn’t trust herself not to punch another wall if the good doctor did ask.

“Well, then,” Yewll says after a long moment. “In the interest of keeping Amanda away from my sharp and pointy things…” She turns away from them both, and makes a noisy show of rummaging through her medical equipment. “You know the drill by now, slugger. Do I have to waste my breath saying it again?”

Berlin looks down at the floor. For once, it’s not spinning. “No, sir.”

The words make her feel sick all over again, acid surging to the back of her mouth, and it takes more out of her than she’d ever admit to force the feeling back down. _Yes, sir. No, sir._ She’ll never have to say that again.

It’s funny, in a tragic sort of way. She’s never really been the type to blithely follow orders, never obedient enough to do what she’s told without thinking or questioning, but with the E-Rep it all just slipped into place, as straightforward and simple as if she really was an obedient little ‘yes’ girl all along. With them, obedience came almost as second nature, not just because she’d be back out on the streets if she didn’t keep her head down but because she actually cared about the people barking those orders, because for the first time in her life she actually had a reason to respect the chain of command, and the big-hats at the top of it.

It’s over now, all of that, just like everything else she thought she’d have forever. _Yes, sir. No, sir._ She’s said it for the last time. Funny how, after all those years of learning to obey, all of a sudden she has no idea how to live without someone telling her what to do.

If Yewll senses any of that, she doesn’t mention it. She just rolls her eyes and gives Berlin’s thigh an indelicate slap. “Down, girl,” she says. “You want to _‘sir’_ me, you’ll have to buy me dinner first.”

“No-one wants that,” Amanda mutters.

Berlin doesn’t say that a part of her kind of does want it. In the first she’s at least eighty per cent sure that Yewll was joking, and in the second how do you even begin to explain what that feels like? Out of uniform, Berlin has always been the boss, always been in charge of everyone and everything she chose to spend her time on. She had to be, if she wanted to show up at work the next morning with her obedience intact. Had to work through that ever-present rebellious streak somehow, had to work through the parts of herself that couldn’t quite stomach being bossed around even when she knew it was for the best, even when she believed in it. It always just made sense: do what she was told when her clothes were on then take charge when she took them off. But now?

Now there’s none of that. There’s no superior officers to give orders, no-one to make sure she follows them. There’s no tight-lipped authority figures pacing back and forth and expecting a salute and a _‘yes, sir.’_ It makes her seriously think about it, about Yewll and her _‘wine me and dine me’_ and other less over-the-table things. It makes her think about going back to the NeedWant, makes her think about finding someone who’ll let her call them _sir_ for less than the price of a good meal, someone who’ll tell her what to do, give orders, take control…

“Uh.” She takes a deep breath, clears her throat. “Yeah.”

Yewll shrugs. “Your loss. Now, sit tight and try not to break anything else. I need more surgical tape, and a stiff drink.”

“You don’t drink,” Amanda points out.

Yewll’s already halfway to the door, and she doesn’t bother to look back. “I didn’t do a lot of things before I came to this town.”

Berlin closes her eyes. She can relate.

—

Half an hour and three strapped fingers later, they’re back out on the street.

Amanda’s distracted, muttering to herself. She keeps one hand at Berlin’s back, supporting her like always, but her fingers are restless now in a way they weren’t before, tapping against the curve of her spine, drumming out nonsense rhythms seemingly without even realising she’s doing it. It’s more annoying than comforting, honestly; Berlin wants to flinch away from her, put some space between them, but she doesn’t have the heart. Amanda has been good to her, much kinder than she deserves, and it’s more than she can do to turn away now.

Besides, whatever’s bothering Amanda, it’ll make for a good distraction, a step away from the chaos inside her own head, the constant back and forth from mnemonic panic to present pain. She takes a breath, tightens the muscles in her back until they hurt, lets Amanda feel the tension.

“What was that all about?” she asks.

Amanda studies her for a long moment. “Hm?” she asks, like she’s trying to figure out how far she can get away with playing dumb. The answer, of course, is _‘not at all,’_ and Berlin makes that perfectly clear.

“You and Doc Yewll.” She lets her eyes harden just a little; it makes a nice change from the veil of tears. “Seemed pretty uncomfortable back there between you two. Something going on that I need to know about?”

Amanda chews the inside of her cheek. Her fingers twitch one last time against Berlin’s back, and then she pulls away entirely. “Haven’t we just established that you don’t ‘need to know’ anything any more?”

That cuts, and Berlin is so taken aback by the needless cruelty that she doesn’t even try to keep her reactions in check. Part of her knows that it was intentional, that this is Amanda’s favourite defence mechanism, pushing people away before they get a chance to get too close or care too much. She’s trying to make Berlin flinch, trying to make her walk away; she _wants_ it to cut, and Berlin knows that she shouldn’t rise to it, that she should be the stronger person… but the fact is, at least for right now, she isn’t. She doesn’t have the strength to stand up against that kind of cruelty, to angle her chin just right and square her jaw and play the perfectly rehabilitated ex-soldier. She doesn’t have the strength to shake her head and say _‘stop deflecting and answer the question.’_ Hell, she barely has the strength to stay on her own damn feet.

She’s not the person Amanda’s used to talking to like this. Not any more, maybe never again, and Amanda knows perfectly well that she is too damn weak to take a hit like that and come back standing.

“That hurt,” she says, brutally honest because honesty and brutality are all she has left.

Amanda doesn’t look at her. Her eyes are wet and bright, locked high on the arch. “Yeah, well.” She grits her teeth, and keeps right on walking. “It’s the truth. You’re not a soldier any more. You’re not a member of the E-Rep.” She doesn’t say _‘you’re nothing,’_ but Berlin can tell she wants to. “Any problem I might have with Doc Yewll is none of your business.”

“I wasn’t asking as a soldier,” Berlin says, very quietly; her eyes are stinging too. “Or as a member of the E-Rep. And I wasn’t asking because I thought it was my business.” She takes a breath, steadies her voice. “I was just asking.”

Amanda sighs, and slowly softens. Her shoulders are shaking.

“I know,” she says. She sounds sincere enough, but she doesn’t take her eyes off the arch, not even for a second. “I’m sorry.”

Berlin wants to shrug it off. She wants to laugh and say they’ve both had a long night and a long morning, wants to point out that neither of them have really slept, that they’re still reeling from the last few days, from the world that didn’t end and all the lives that did. She wants to do and say a lot of things, but of course she doesn’t. Amanda’s still not looking at her, but there’s no misinterpreting how tense she is, jaw clenching and spine unnaturally straight; she looks like the kind of brooding protagonist Berlin might cast in one of her films, the kind of tragic hero who stares artfully at the sunset, who thinks deep thoughts and only speaks in monosyllables.

This isn’t a film, though, and Amanda is not some blithely-scripted character. She’s a real person, the same one who stayed up all night with a worthless wasted idiot who couldn’t stand on her own two feet, the same one who has spent half the next day taking care of that same damn idiot. She’s someone that Berlin flatters herself she kind of maybe knows, not like a figure in a film, studying movement and memorising lines from behind the camera, but up close and personal, like two real people standing next to each other, existing side by side. As desperately as she wants to pretend it’s just a film, pretend it’s something that could be re-shot or re-written or re-cast, it’s not. And she can’t pretend that those words didn’t hurt.

“I’m sorry too,” she says. It’s not what she wants to say, but it’s all she can. Her jaw hurts worse than her fingers, and trying to breathe hurts worst of all. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

Amanda sighs again, but this time her shoulders stay steady. They heave in time with her breathing, but recover themselves straight away, and for a moment or two Berlin can almost imagine the woman she must have been before they met, before Pottinger and Mercado showed up to take all her power away. It’s just a glimmer, a flicker, but there she is, the woman who held this whole damn town in her hands, not Madame Rosewater the head of the NeedWant, but Mayor Rosewater, prim and proper and sitting in Pottinger’s big fancy chair. Berlin wonders what Defiance was like in her hands, if it was any safer there then than it is now, if its people could walk down the street without fear of a riot or a firing squad.

“No,” Amanda says after a moment. Her voice is still low, but it’s stronger now, like her shoulders. “You had every right to ask. It’s not like any of this is a secret, really, and you…” She closes her eyes, shakes her head, like she’s fighting off some terrible memories of her own. “Well. I guess you wanted a distraction.”

Berlin swallows hard. Her stomach turns over and over, and her fingers throb in rhythm with the gash under her eye. It all hurts, every part of her, and she would give anything to make it stop. “Yeah.”

Another long moment, then another, then at last Amanda turns away from the arch, finds Berlin’s eyes again. There’s a haunted kind of sorrow burning behind hers, and a loneliness that resonates with Berlin’s own. It makes her think of Tommy, of the way her chest still seizes when she remembers his face. It makes her think of Camp Reverie too, of the way her lungs feel like bursting when she shuts her eyes and finds herself back there, when she’s staring down a dozen E-Rep gun barrels, when she’s swaying on her feet and silently, secretly praying for death to strike swiftly, for the grief and the guilt and the pain to finally end.

“Come on,” Amanda says, and finds her good hand. “I think I owe you a drink.”

Berlin tries to recall last night. She remembers lying face-down on someone else’s bed, remembers perfume and pillows and pain, remembers Amanda’s hands on her back and her voice in her ear. She remembers sobbing until there was nothing left in her, remembers, begging Amanda to stay, remembers pain and shame, nausea and vertigo and spinning. She remembers dreaming, sweating, waking up in Amanda’s arms. She remembers feeling so damn sick she couldn’t stand it, remembers struggling not to faint in Pottinger’s office. She remembers a hundred reasons to never set foot in the NeedWant again, and not a single reason to go back.

She’s had so much to drink over the last couple of days, and it only ever seems to end in more misery and more pain, in making bad decisions and getting her fingers taped. It’s a stupid, dangerous idea, and the soldier in her knows that she should turn it down.

Ah, but she’s not a soldier any more, is she? And she doesn’t give a damn what she should or shouldn’t do.

She follows the line of Amanda’s gaze, finds the arch and watches it blur and swerve. She lets herself wonder what that stupid ugly thing means to the people of this town, the people who were raised here, these people who have never known anything else, who never had any reason to look just a little bit further and see the threats and the dangers rippling beyond the horizon, past that great big impossible curve. She wonders what Amanda sees when she looks at it, if she’s seeing her own dashed hopes or those darker threats that no-one in this town can afford to ignore any more.

Berlin takes a deep breath, forces down the last of the nausea, the last of the regret.

“Make it two,” she says.

—

Amanda drinks like a pro. Berlin drinks like a lush.

Nothing new there, really, even without the still-pounding hangover to make it worse. She’s always had trouble holding her liquor, always had trouble pacing herself and taking things in moderation. She’s always had all kinds of trouble, to tell the truth, and sometimes it feels like her drinking habits are more a reflection of other things than they are a discourse on her tolerance. Not that it matters; this time she has an excuse ready-made, the throbbing behind her eyes and the swirling in her stomach, and even if she didn’t there’s no judgement in the way Amanda watches her, no chastisement in the way she smiles.

(God, Berlin could lose herself in that smile. On a better day, if one ever comes, maybe she will.)

It’s not right, though. Amanda’s looking at her like this is okay, like it’s normal to drink so much and so often, to drown herself so completely and at every opportunity. Even Berlin is sober enough to realise she’s got that backwards. They’re not exactly friends, at least not in any meaningful sense of the word, but they’ve spent enough time together that maybe some day soon they could angle for something like it. Amanda’s good at taking care of people, and while Berlin’s never been the kind to let anyone take care of her it’s so easy to forget the need to be strong when Amanda’s arms are stronger.

It’s hard, probably for both of them, to remember that the kinder gesture would be to take the glass away, not fill it up again.

Amanda doesn’t slur when she drinks, but she does talk. A lot. Berlin’s not really in any condition to listen, but it’s still kind of refreshing to see the tables turned a little bit; Amanda is so closed off when she’s sober, so protective of her privacy and her personal space, but get a couple of shots in her and she throws herself open like a damn book, the kind that fills its pages with loving illustrations and detailed footnotes. After so much time spent drowning in her own angst, Berlin appreciates a glimpse into someone else’s.

She talks about her sister, Kenya, about Doc Yewll, about the Votanis Collective and the Earth Republic, about Indogene technology and deception and heartbreak, about death and loss and healed wounds being ripped open all over again. She talks and talks and talks, and the longer she talks the more her voice wavers, the more she stares into her glass instead of sipping from it, the harder she blinks. It’s like the anger and the hurt can’t hold themselves up next to the sweeter memories, the softer feelings, like she can’t control those parts of herself when she’s spilling them onto the bar like bad whiskey.

She’s so open when she talks like this, her heart spread out across her sleeve, across her collar, across every damn part of her. It makes Berlin feel broken, makes her wonder if she’ll ever be open like that herself, if she’ll ever be able to talk about the E-Rep with that kind of freedom, if she’ll ever be able to think of her former family, or of Tommy, and not want to break down crying.

It makes her reach for another drink. And another.

Amanda doesn’t stop her. She’s practically forgotten Berlin’s there at all.

“It was the Tarrs…” she says to her glass, seemingly apropos of nothing.

Berlin shuts her eyes, wills herself to stay upright, then wonders why the bar is suddenly so close to her chin. “Who’s got a scar?”

“What?” It’s a very long moment before the confusion irons itself out, and when it does Amanda gives her a thwack on the shoulder for not paying attention. “ _Tarr_ ,” she snaps, “not _scar_. You know, Datak and Stahma.”

“Oh.” The bar’s a good few inches closer to her face now. She steadies herself with her good hand, and tries to figure out whether her eyes are open or not. “What about them?”

It’s a stupid question, and the weight of it hits them both half a second later. Amanda flinches, braces herself to explain something she thought needed no explanation, and Berlin finds herself thrown back to Camp Reverie all over again, back to the hailstorm of bullets and blood, to a firing squad dropping down dead right in front of her, to the Tarrs striding through the smoke like the big climactic moment in an old Earth movie. _‘It was the Tarrs,’_ Amanda said, and though Berlin knows that she’s supposed to be sympathetic it’s so damn difficult to shut down that memory once it rears up, to close her mind against the haze of gunfire and death, to focus past it all and hear what she’s saying.

“They killed her.” Her voice is a tremor now, not a liquor-tainted slur like Berlin’s but a wash of pain and grief. “Stahma was sleeping with her or… some domestic bullshit, I don’t even know. Don’t care. Point is, they did it.”

Berlin tries to keep breathing, tries to want to. “Oh,” she says again.

If Amanda is annoyed by the lack of reaction, she doesn’t let it show. She just keeps right on going, like she’s been talking to herself the whole time. “You want to know how I know?”

“They blamed it on a spaceship?”

Amanda doesn’t laugh. She doesn’t even crack a smile. “Niles told me. Right before everything went to hell. Trussed them up like a turkey, put a gun in my hand, and said _‘do what you want with them.’_ Just like that.” She snorts, shakes her head, like she still can’t believe it. “Crazy, right?”

“Crazy,” Berlin echoes. Her voice cracks. “Right.”

Amanda stops playing with her drink long enough to take a mouthful. She swallows slowly, almost automatically, like she needs the rhythm, the habit, more than the taste.

“I didn’t do it,” she says, rather unnecessarily. “I wanted to. I mean, I _really_ wanted to. Would’ve given anything to put a bullet through both of their heads. But I didn’t.”

Her hand drifts down, and she presses her palm to Berlin’s back, a couple of inches lower than she would probably venture if either one of them was sober. The contact is heavy, sloppy, and Berlin’s shirt crumples and creases between her fingers. Berlin thinks about smoothing out the lines, but then she realises that she shouldn’t be wearing it anyway, that the uniform and its colours aren’t hers any more. Amanda threads the folds through her fingers, rubs slow circles with the heel of her palm. It makes Berlin feel like a liar, like she’s wearing someone else’s face, someone else’s clothes, someone else’s life.

 _Please don’t do that,_ she thinks, but all that comes out is another stuttering “Oh.”

“I guess you know how that feels, huh?” Amanda goes on. She spreads her fingers; the creases flatten themselves just a little. “If they’d survived all this… Nolan and Irisa, I mean… I’m sure you’d want…”

She doesn’t finish. Berlin wonders which of the two of them she’s really appealing to here, whether she’s trying to find something kindred in Berlin’s rawest feelings or if she just wants some hollow reassurance that she’s not alone in wanting to do terrible things to the people who killed her loved ones. Berlin tries to twist her tongue to an answer, but it’s too messy, too complicated, and the chaos in her head won’t fit in her mouth. She doesn’t know what to say; honestly, she doesn’t really know if she has an answer at all. She can’t think, and she doesn’t want to.

Not that it matters, because Amanda doesn’t give her a chance to try. She’s already rushing on, cutting off both their trains of thought with yet another floundering apology.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have said that. Didn’t mean to reopen old wounds.”

“Not so old,” Berlin mumbles. She thinks of Datak, his grand entrance, a gun in each hand and his wife at his side. _‘Good evening, Captain,’_ he said, and she didn’t know then any more than she knows now what she was supposed to feel, how not dying should taste. “Not old enough.”

Amanda pats her back. The shirt wrinkles a little more. “I suppose not.” She sighs. “Sorry.”

“Don’t.” Berlin swallows hard, tastes acid and the remnants of booze. Her chin hits the bar. “You should… you should have.”

“Not really,” Amanda says. “I know how much Tommy’s death affected you. It’s needlessly cruel to bring it up all over again just to pat my own ego.”

Berlin shakes her head. Everything around her fades to black for a very, very long moment. She thinks she’s going to pass out, but she doesn’t. She just starts feeling ill again, and the unpleasant memories sharpen with sickening clarity. It will end badly, she knows, and more than anything else in the world she wishes that Amanda had found the strength in her to pull that damn trigger, to put the Tarrs out of their misery so the world could put Berlin out of hers.

“Not that.” Admitting it aloud is brutal, but she does it. “ _Them_. The _Tarrs.”_

This time, it’s Amanda who says “Oh.”

It’s not enough. Not for either of them. Berlin wants to say more, wants to explain why. She wants to say _‘if you’d killed them, I’d be dead too.’_ She wants Amanda to see that, to know it and understand what it means, that she’d be with Tommy now, that she’d be free and whole, that she wouldn’t be stuck here in a uniform that isn’t hers, in a town that isn’t home, with a woman who isn’t family. It means that she wouldn’t be _here_ , and she wants so desperately to make Amanda understand how important that is.

She wants to, yes, but she knows that it wouldn’t work out that way if she tried. The words won’t come out right, and of course Amanda would never take them the way Berlin intends them. She’d hear the words, _‘they wouldn’t have saved my life if you hadn’t saved theirs,’_ and she would take that as an assurance that she did the right thing. She’d take it as comfort, as a blessing, that sparing the lives of her sister’s murderers helped to save other lives as well, Rafe McCawley, all those others at Camp Reverie that night, and some worthless nobody in a captain’s uniform with no idea what was to come. _‘Look at what you did to me,’_ Berlin would say, and Amanda would hear _‘I’m alive because you were merciful.’_

It’s not a good thing. Not from where Berlin’s sitting, and she can’t bear the thought of Amanda’s soft smile, of her relief and her solace-stained tears, of _‘thank you’_ and _‘that means a lot to me’_ and all that empty shtako. She doesn’t want her to see a blessing, doesn’t want her to see something beautiful and wonderful. She doesn’t want Amanda to be glad that she saved her life; she wants her to be sorry that she stole her death.

The room fades to black again. The bar is smooth and cool against her skin, her chin and her cheek and the gash under her eye, little butterfly wounds held together by more of Yewll’s surgical tape; the contact is a welcome contrast to Amanda’s hand, to the heat radiating from her palm and the way she makes that stupid uniform shirt cling to Berlin’s skin. The looming darkness is a welcome contrast too, to the swaying of the bar, the swerve of the ceiling and the floor, the distant chatter of people in the background and the hum of Amanda’s voice nearby.

“Should’ve killed them,” she hears herself mumble, a dizzy echo as the darkness swells to swallow her. “Should’ve killed us all.”

—


	3. Chapter 3

—

She wakes in that same stupid upstairs room.

It’s the same story, too, a twisted repetition of old mistakes and a pounding headache that says _‘you’ll never learn, will you?’_ Nothing has changed at all; she’s still surrounded by the same silk sheets, the same feather pillows, the same perfumes and unbearable softness, the same cloying smells that turn her stomach, and Amanda’s hand is resting just as heavily on her back. The only difference is that this time it’s skin on skin, calloused palms and padded fingertips drumming against flat muscle with no fabric to keep the contact chaste. Far more than the drilling in her brain, it’s the intimacy that jolts her back to awareness.

“Wha—”

But, of course, that’s as far as her body lets her go. She tries to sit up, to look around and figure out why everything feels so exposed, but her arms won’t hold her upright and her head’s too heavy. She lets out a low, miserable, groan, and as if on cue Amanda flattens her palm, a tender brush across the skin that lights Berlin’s nerves on fire.

“Welcome back,” she says, then chuckles. “You know, I think it’s about time we cut you off.”

Her tone is light, but there’s something deeper lurking just underneath, a flicker of something that sounds like worry. Understandable, Berlin supposes, given where they are and why. It’s far from the first time she’s found herself dazed and hung over in a prostitute’s bedroom, or even the first time she’s done it twice in a row, but this is very different from the typical morning-after shame, the standard-issue discomfort that comes with over-indulgence, with too much scrip and too much time and too many regrets. This is the kind of pattern that can easily get dangerous, the kind that comes from sorrow and the need to drown, and of course Amanda recognises the difference. Of course she’s talking like all of that is so damn obvious, like it doesn’t need to be said.

Berlin tries not to think too hard about that, how easily Amanda can shift from vengeful grieving sister to softness and compassion, to familiar hands tracing patterns across Berlin’s back and tender words murmured in her ear, to this room and all its sickening softness, to all those things that Berlin had desperately hoped she’d never have to see again.

It makes her feel weak, pathetic; Amanda clearly has her own demons to fight as well, Kenya and the Tarrs and whatever else the world has dumped on her. She has real troubles, just like everyone else, but here she is again throwing them to the side so she can swoop in and rescue some stupid ex-soldier who can’t hold her liquor, can’t take care of herself, who can’t even die when death is handed over on a silver platter. It’s the last thing Berlin wants for either one of them, and she doesn’t feel well.

“How long was I out?” she croaks.

It’s not what she wants to say, and they both know it. She wants to say _‘I’m sorry for being like this’_ or _‘I wish I could be better,’_ but that stupid pointless question is as many syllables as she’s capable of making at the moment. In any case it’s easy enough to answer, and Amanda’s hand starts moving again, small slow circles that ignite the skin all over again.

“Two or three hours, maybe.” Berlin can hear the warmth in her voice, another half-laugh hitching in her throat. “You weren’t out the whole time, though. You drifted in and out a lot. Kept talking about lenses and apertures and other things I didn’t really understand. Oh, and you tried to pick a fight with the pillow. Said it didn’t understand ‘true artistic vision’ or something.” She musters a chuckle, but it’s strangled and humourless. “Be thankful I didn’t confiscate it.”

Berlin doesn’t remember doing anything like that. She just remembers drinking and wishing Amanda would stop her. She remembers words like _Kenya_ and _Tarrs_ and _killed_ , remembers saying _‘oh’_ probably a dozen more times than she should have, remembers the way Amanda didn’t seem to care if she said anything at all. She remembers remembering things she didn’t want to, echoes of voices and panic and the taste of blood. She remembers trying, remembers thinking that Amanda deserves someone better, remembers trying to explain, remembers the way the words wouldn’t come. She remembers the bar, remembers it getting closer and closer to her chin, remembers the world going black, remembers wanting to die.

None of that is especially different to what she’s feeling right now, to be honest. Hell, it’s not much different to what she’s been feeling for days.

“Ugh.” It’s a grunt, and only fractionally less erudite than it would have been if she was sober. “Whatever I did, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

There’s something very serious in Amanda’s tone now, something new, and she pulls her hand away so that Berlin can roll over to look at her. It’s a struggle, moving at all without giving in to the jackhammer pounding away inside her head, but she wills herself to do it anyway, for Amanda’s sake if not her own. Amanda’s smile is worth the pain, and she scoots over when Berlin gets herself upright, gives her some room to stretch out.

“You’re too forgiving,” Berlin mutters.

“No, I’m not.” There is is again, that seriousness, strength cutting through the usual softness. “Unhealthy coping mechanisms are par for the course in this town, even on a good day. And after what you’ve been through…” She shrugs, like that dismisses everything. The lines of her shoulders blur as she moves, little shimmers in the spaces where her skin meets her shirt, and Berlin has to look away or be sick. “Look. You’re still here. Still breathing. That counts for a lot.”

Berlin feels very small. She doesn’t know if she wants to cry or punch something. “Does it?”

Amanda doesn’t look horrified. She doesn’t say _‘how can you ask such a thing?’_ or _‘of course it does, don’t be silly!’_. She doesn’t act like the answer is obvious, like there’s only one. She just sighs and nods, then leans in until their arms are touching, until their faces are very close.

“Yeah,” she says, very quietly. “Yeah, it does.”

Berlin swallows hard, looks away. She can’t bear the closeness, the so-close-to-intimacy. “Doesn’t feel like it,” she whispers, and wonders if Amanda understands just how difficult a confession that is, how painful it is to speak the words aloud, to make them real in a place where someone might hear them. “I know that’s an awful thing to say.”

“It’s not.” Amanda sighs. The strength flickers and fades, leaving only the softness behind. “God knows, I’ve felt that way myself.”

That shouldn’t help as much as it does. “You have?”

“Absolutely.” Neither of them are particularly comfortable right now, and eye-contact is more than either one of them could endure, so they both settle for staring into different corners of the room. Berlin squints at the door, wonders if she could get away with running for it, and Amanda turns her face upwards, studying the lines between ceiling and wall. “Lost. Hurt.” Her voice catches. “You’re so angry you can’t see, and so lonely you can’t breathe. Am I close?”

Berlin’s heart sinks. _No,_ she thinks. _You’re so far away I can’t even see you any more._

She feels lost, yeah, and hurt, but that’s as far as it goes. She feels alone, but that’s not the same as loneliness; she’s been through enough of both to know the difference. It’s a strange feeling, and if she could put it into words as easily as Amanda does, she wouldn’t need her around to explain it, would she? There’s no convenient little box for someone to put a happy little check-mark in, no piece of paper with _‘lonely’_ and _‘angry’_ and _‘hurt’_ scribbled out in pencil; there isn’t an easy way to quantify it, and she doesn’t even know where to begin.

Honestly, the only thing she knows for sure is that she’s not angry. Not even a little. Anger is a very powerful emotion — she knows that from repeated experience — and she doesn’t have anything close to the strength it would need. If Irisa showed up in the doorway this very second, Berlin wouldn’t even try to make her pay for Tommy. She’s so tired, so damn broken right now that given the choice and the chance she’d probably just shove one of those pretty little knives into the bitch’s hands and say _‘why don’t you finish me off too?’_ It would put everyone out of their misery, and make everything so much easier.

She wants to give voice to all of that, to make Amanda see the differences between them, or at least the differences between the way they process their feeling. But where the hell would she even begin?

It’s impossible. Even if she was completely sober, even if she’d been sober for weeks upon weeks it would still be impossible; her throat seizes up just thinking of putting those things into words, making it real and raw and true. _I don’t understand why I’m still alive when Tommy isn’t. I don’t understand why you let the Tarrs survive when their deaths would have meant mine. I don’t understand why assholes like us get a thousand chances when good people like Tommy don’t even get one._ How the hell is she supposed to say that? How the hell is she supposed to make Amanda hear it?

So, no, she doesn’t. She doesn’t tell Amanda that she’s wrong, that she doesn’t understand at all, but she doesn’t pretend she’s got it right either. Amanda doesn’t deserve either of those things, the bitter truth or the calloused lie, so Berlin takes a deep breath and changes the subject completely. She wraps her arms around herself, shivering, and blurts out the first stupid thing that comes to mind.

“What happened to my shirt?”

Amanda makes a confused noise, no doubt thrown by the sudden shift. It’s only a moment, though, and then she’s rolling with it like that was her plan the whole time. Maybe she senses that Berlin can’t handle the other conversation just yet, that even just thinking about it causes more pain than she can endure, or maybe she’s grateful for the change of subject as well, scrabbling just like Berlin for something stupid and simple, something that doesn’t make them feel like their hearts are being ripped out through bullet-holes they only wish existed. It’s a little too smooth, though, the way she shrugs, and Berlin takes some small comfort from that.

“You took it off.” She’s not smiling; no doubt she can’t quite manage it yet, but still there’s a gleam in her eye, a flicker of something as close to amusement as either one of them could hope for. “You were… upset with it.”

Berlin blinks. She definitely doesn’t remember that. “I… what?”

Amanda cocks her head, points to the other side of the room. Berlin squints, recognises her uniform shirt crumpled in the corner; even balled up and tossed aside as it is, there’s no mistaking that shade of blue, no mistaking the cut of the collar or the straightness of the sleeves. She’s worn those stupid shirts every goddamn day since she was sixteen years old; she’d recognise one with a far worse hangover than this, and from twice the distance too. Little wonder that she wanted to get the damn thing out of her sight, she supposes; she sure as hell won’t be wearing it again. Knowing that now, looking at it makes her chest tighten until she can’t breathe, makes her ribs squeeze her lungs until heat blossoms across the bruises left behind from Reverie.

“I think…” Amanda’s rubbing her back again, gentle but bracing, like she’s preparing her for some bad news. Like Berlin hasn’t swallowed a lifetime’s worth of that already. “Well. You know, you’re… you’re going to need a new wardrobe. I think the weight of it finally just hit you.”

Berlin turns her face away. She doesn’t want Amanda to see that it’s hitting her all over again right now, that it’s not confusion making her blink, but pain and fresh new tears. Stupid, right? She knows it is. It’s just a stupid shirt, just a stupid shade of blue. It’s nothing important, nothing that should matter at all, but it defined her for nearly half her life, a symbol as much as a shirt. And that’s not something she can ignore just because she tossed it into a corner in a drunken fit of temper.

She stands slowly, carefully. Her legs still feel wobbly, head still pounding, but she keeps herself upright well enough this time, and it’s not nearly as difficult as she expects to walk in a mostly-straight line. Amanda doesn’t say anything, but Berlin is painfully aware of the way she’s watching her, the intensity and the sympathy and the bitten-back ache to move with her, to stay by her side while she crosses to the crumpled-up remains of her — the Earth Republic’s — shirt. It’s hard to bite her lip and pretend that she doesn’t notice that, to pretend there isn’t a part of her that secretly wants it, that misses the contact when the cold air floods in to chill her exposed skin, raising goosebumps and shivers in the places that remember Amanda’s hands.

The shirt is a mess. She’ll have to clean it, straighten the wrinkles and the creases, make it presentable. She’ll have to do a lot of things to it before it’s in any condition to give back to the people who want it but not her. She’s not looking forward to that, handing the damn thing over with a smile and a shrug, crossing her arms and nodding and saying _‘here you go,’_ like she’s not surrendering the last little piece of the world that put her life back together after the raiders blew it apart. It’s going to hurt like hell, she knows, and swallows hard.

She hugs the stupid thing tight, holds it up to her face and breathes it in. It smells of liquor and sweat, of herself and more than a decade of hard work, of the life they gave her and the life she built for herself, of home and safety and family. It smells of everything she thought would always be there, everything she thought she could always depend on.

She wonders, briefly, what would have happened if they had killed her at Reverie. Would they wash off the bloodstains, patch up the bullet holes, clean the shirt and press it and pass it on to someone new? Would they tell those wide-eyed new recruits where it came from? Would they pin her picture to the wall with a plaque reading _‘killed in action,’_ or would they try to pretend it was all brand new, sweep Captain Rainier under the rug like she never even existed at all?

Her fists clench of their own accord, the good one with the blue fabric crumpled between its fingers and the bad one with its strapped knuckles; they don’t bend properly and they hurt when she tries, but the spasm is more than she can stop, reflex turning to violence and the urge to tear the damn shirt to shreds, leave her mark on it, make it unrepairable, make it so that they won’t ever pass on her name to someone new. Shreds and scraps aren’t patched up as easily as bullet holes, and the mess she wants to leave behind has too many stains to ever wash out.

“Hey.”

Berlin jolts. She hadn’t noticed Amanda moving, so caught up in her own thoughts, but suddenly she’s right there at her side again, a breath away and breathing hard. She doesn’t touch her, not this time, but Berlin can tell that she wants to; she can see the fluttering in her fingertips, the ache to reach out tempered by the certainty that it would end badly if she did. Truthfully, Berlin’s not sure whether she appreciates the restraint or resents the coddling.

“It’s just a shirt,” she hears herself mumble, but Amanda clearly doesn’t believe that any more than she herself does. “It’s not… it doesn’t matter.”

“It matters,” Amanda says. Her eyes are misty and her voice is rough; it’s like she’s a million miles away. “I’m sure I could dig up some of my old ones, if you’d like them?”

Berlin musters a wry smile; it’s not much, and it fades faster than it appears, but it’s the best she can do. She thinks about pointing out that they don’t exactly wear the same size, that the tight curves of a brothel madam are so very difference to the tightness in a soldier’s shoulders. She thinks about pointing out that she wears muscle in all the places Amanda wears her sinew and slink, that she’s rough where Amanda is lean… but of course, they both know it’s not about the fit at all.

It’s a hand extended, a way of saying _‘I’ll help you to adjust if you want me to’_ and _‘whatever you need, I’ll make it happen,_ without having to say the words, without risking an explosion or another breakdown or whatever bullshtak Berlin’s unpredictable brain pulls out next, without tearing the wounds open again by reminding her that they’re still there, that they won’t be going anywhere any time soon. It’s a nice gesture, nothing more, and of course Berlin can’t deal with that.

She tries to say _‘I don’t need your charity’_ instead. She tries to say _‘I don’t want your help’_ or _‘stop trying to coddle me.’_ She tries to make them both believe that she’s more than she really is, that she’s stronger and tougher, that she’s worth more than some brothel owner’s second-hand clothes. She tries to say a lot of things, but none of them are true, and they all twist and turn into the same worthless lie.

“It’s just a shirt.” Over and over and over and _oh_ , how she wishes it was true. “It’s just a stupid shirt. It’s just…”

Her vision is blurring, and there’s a ringing in her ears, like bullets flying past her head, like the moment before they hit, like the whine and the scream and the shower of blood, like the heat of adrenaline, like a jump rig or a full-frontal assault, like that stupid just-a-shirt clinging to her skin after a long day, like the way the collar always goes flat in heat, like the way the sleeves never stay rolled up… like…

“Hey,” Amanda says again. She does touch her now, prying the shirt out of her hands and holding her gently by the wrists. “Berlin. Jessica. Hey.”

Berlin can’t breathe. _It’s just a shirt,_ she tells herself, praying that the words will mean more inside her own head than they do out there on the cold empty air. _It’s not your life, and it doesn’t define you. It’s just a stupid chupping shirt, and you are not going to cry over it. You hear me, soldier? You hear me?_

She does hear, yes, but of course she doesn’t obey.

The first sob wrenches out of her like a scream. The second knocks all the air out of her, brings her down to her knees. The third is drowned by Amanda’s shoulder, by the neat lines of someone else’s clothes, pressed clean and perfect, a madam’s shirt not a soldier’s, and one that will never ever fit. The fourth, fifth, sixth tear through her like shrapnel, and the seventh…

…the seventh is where she stops counting.

—

Afterwards, when it’s over, Amanda holds her close and says “It’s okay.”

Berlin knows that. It’s always ‘okay’, isn’t it? That’s part of the damn problem. If it wasn’t ‘okay’, she wouldn’t feeling like this; she wouldn’t be here in the first place. She would have been killed all those years ago with the rest of her family, would have starved to death in the years that came after, would have been shot full of bullets on her first field mission with the E-Rep. There’s a thousand situations that should have killed her, and a thousand more that should have ended in a thousand other horrible ways, and that’s not even counting Camp Reverie and the end of the world that never came. A thousand reasons she should be dead or worse, but here she is. Again and again and again she finds herself _here_ , alive and in one piece, and nothing feels less okay than ‘okay’.

It’s not so easy to tell Amanda that, though, is it? Not so easy to get someone like her her to understand that she is so damn sick of everything being ‘okay’, that maybe just once she wishes that it wasn’t.

“I’m tired,” she says instead. It’s about a million miles away from what she wants to say, what she needs to say, but at the same time it’s so true that it steals her breath. “I’m just so damn _tired_.”

Amanda’s arms are shaking around her. Berlin can feel the tremors through her skin, vibrations that seem to seep in through the places where they’re touching and light up in her own blood too.

“I know.” The words are like tremors too. “So am I.”

—

Amanda’s well-intentioned hand-me-downs don’t fit Berlin at all.

Big surprise, right? Amanda likes things slinky and smooth, likes clothes that hug curves and slide against skin, seductive or practical or some uncomfortable amalgamation of the two. It’s functional in the context of her job, the one she has now and the one she used to have; tending bar and managing whores, or sitting pretty behind a big fancy desk in the days before the occupation, either way she has a perfect little wardrobe all laid out. It’s fine for her, all slender and svelte, but for someone like Berlin, butch even on a good day, it’s a very different story.

She’s not much bigger than Amanda, not really, but it’s more than just their sizes. It’s the way she holds herself, the way she’s built. There’s only a few inches between them in any given directions, but most of the time that feels like a whole lot more. Berlin’s lines are strong and solid and maddeningly straight; it’s as far from Amanda’s sleek curves as another person can get. She’s all sturdy hips and square shoulders, and while the difference between them might not look like much on paper, still it’s enough to stretch those silky-smooth fabrics into something so tight it hurts.

Amanda doesn’t flat-out laugh at the sight of her, but it’s a very close thing.

Berlin, for her part, feels like she’s being shoved into a room with someone else’s name on the door and somehow she’s the only one who’s noticed. Amanda has that pitying look on her face, sad and amused at the same time, like it really is just about the clothes, no deeper meaning at all, like it’s nothing more or less than a shirt that doesn’t cover her cleavage and a pair of pants she can’t get over her damn hips. She doesn’t see the way it hurts, doesn’t understand that it runs so much deeper than pinching nerves and cutting off circulation, bursting seams and popping buttons and all that comedy shtick. It’s the same kind of pain that’s been churning inside of her ever since she stood in Pottinger’s office and stared down the barrel of something far more final than a firing squad. The clothes aren’t working, sure enough, but they’re not the only thing.

“This shtak doesn’t fit,” she sighs. She doesn’t need to say it, not really; they both know she really means _‘your way of living doesn’t fit.’_

“I can see that.” Amanda’s still smiling, but it gets a bit tighter when Berlin turns away. She’s trying real hard to hold her breath, but her shoulders are starting to shudder and she’s not sure she trusts herself to keep it together. “We’ll find something else.”

“Don’t bother.” It sounds a little more defeatist than she meant it to, and a whole lot more ungrateful, but she doesn’t take it back because it’s also the truth. “It’s pointless. What would I do with a new wardrobe anyway?”

She pops a couple more buttons trying to get the stupid shirt off her. Amanda, kind-hearted soul that she is, has the decency not to say anything. She just takes it back, folds it neatly and smooths out the creases, like there’s anything left of it that’s worth salvaging, then sets it down on the bedside table, out of the way and hopefully never to be spoken of again.

“You could work for me,” she says. and Berlin bursts out laughing because _really_?

“Your clients couldn’t afford me.” It’s the politest way she can phrase it.

Amanda laughs too, but it’s nothing like Berlin’s. Berlin is almost on the edge of mania now, so close she can see it, but Amanda’s little breathy chuckles are so soft and so sincere that Berlin’s heart damn near breaks from the sound of them. She laughs like someone who still has so much to lose, and who is very much aware of the fact. Berlin just laughs like someone who has nothing left at all, some broken-down nobody who doesn’t even remember why she’s laughing in the first place.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Amanda says, taking the words, if not the laughter, in stride. “We’ve got some pretty high rollers, you know.”

Berlin does knows that. Nolan, for one, who was never short a fistful of scrip no matter how bad his luck seemed to get. Datak Tarr, for another, crime lord extraordinaire and one of the most influential aliens in town. Not the best examples, but is it really any surprise that they’re the first ones that come to mind? She thinks about Nolan, a man who loves his daughter, about the way Irisa killed Tommy in cold blood and the way that damned idiot made out that it wasn’t really her fault at all. She thinks about Tarr, too, an arrogant jackass swaggering in at the last second to save a sea of convicts from E-Rep justice.

Funny, how things turn around. Nolan the happy cowboy, so convinced he’s always doing the right thing, and who’s the one harbouring a murderer? Datak Tarr, who never once denied his shady underworld dealings, and who’s the one saving lives now? It makes her sick.

“Your high rollers aren’t really my kind of people,” she says flatly.

Amanda’s face falls. Berlin doesn’t need to ask to know that she’s thinking about the same people, about a cowboy she might once have cared about (and probably more than she ever wanted to), about his misunderstood daughter and the Ark-brain that made her do terrible things, and then about the Castithan bastard that she hates so much, a man who orchestrated the death of her sister, a cold-blooded crime lord and an unrepentant villain. One of them is probably dead, the other is definitely not, and isn’t it so damn hilarious, the different reasons Amanda and Berlin have for both wishing it was the other way around?

“No,” Amanda sighs after a moment. “No, I suppose they’re not.”

Berlin opens her mouth. She wants to say _‘I’m sorry about your sister.’_ She wants to say _‘I want to be there for you too’_ or _‘you can tell me all the reasons why you hate Datak Tarr and I’ll listen’_ or even just something stupid and weak like _’I understand’_. She wants Amanda to know that this should run both ways, that maybe in a couple of weeks it will; it feels so important that she realises Berlin isn’t always like this, that she’s not always so selfish and locked up inside her own trauma, that she’s never felt like this before in her whole damn life. She’s so lost, so completely trapped inside her pain and loss and guilt, and she wants Amanda to know that she understands she’s not the only one. She wants to hug back for once, wants to give instead of always taking, but her throat is hoarse and dry and just like always the words don’t come.

The words that do come, tearing out of her throat before she can stop them, are “Datak Tarr saved my life at Reverie.”

Amanda flinches. Her whole body goes whipcord-tight and she pulls away, like she’s bracing for the worst kind of attack, or maybe like she’s already been struck; it’s an odd look, caught between the pain of getting shot full of bullets and the pain of watching someone else suffer the same. They’re very different kinds of pain, and Berlin knows from her own experience that they’re both as horrible as each other; heartbreaking, then, how the look on Amanda’s face makes it clear that she’s feeling them both at the same time.

“I beg your pardon?” she manages at last.

Berlin wets her lips, steadies herself. “Datak Tarr.” She says the name very slowly, very carefully, not least of all because she needs all her strength to keep her voice and her heart from breaking. “And Stahma too, I guess. Both of them. He pulled the trigger, but she… they…” She trails off, chokes down the horror and the tears, the nightmare surging back to the surface; it’s like she’s back there, going through it all over again, watching those soldiers fall in slow-motion and wondering why she can’t feel anything. “They needed McCawley for something. ‘Family emergency’, they called it. Didn’t say what. Saved him. Saved me. Saved a lot of people.”

 _Saved_. The word echoes like an unwanted memory. She hates the things it does to her, and the things it does to Amanda.

She’s shaking, and it’s more than she can do to stop it, so she drags herself to the bed and sits down. She pulls her knees up to her chest, presses her face between them, and breathes as deep and even as she can. She doesn’t want Amanda to see just how deeply the memory still cuts, how much it hurts to relive the moment, to remember that she survived, that she’s still here, still breathing just like Amanda said. She definitely doesn’t want Amanda to see that it’s not ‘okay’ after all.

“The Tarrs…” Amanda is muttering, a dull, numb-sounding echo.

Berlin swallows over the lump in her throat. “The Tarrs. I’m not dead because of them.” She swallows again, harder; it doesn’t help. “Guess that means I’m not dead because of you, right?”

Amanda swallows as well, like she’s trying not to cry. “Berlin.”

“Yeah.” The name doesn’t sit exactly right; it hasn’t felt that way since Pottinger fired her, but it’s still a hell of a lot more comfortable than _Jessica_. For now, at least, she’ll take it. “And, uh… look, I know I should thank you. You know, for… for that. I know I should… uh… I know I should say…”

“No, you shouldn’t.” It doesn’t sound like comfort, though; it sounds like a plea. “I had no idea. You can’t thank me for something I didn’t even know I was doing.”

Berlin shakes her head, hugs her knees until her body stops shaking, swallows and swallows and swallows. “No,” she says, because it matters, because it feels so damn important. “I should. I know I should. But I… it’s not…”

“You’re not there yet.” It’s a whisper, a confession. It’s everything Berlin wants to say, and everything she can’t. “I get it. Believe me.”

Berlin raises her head. Her eyes are bloodshot, burning, but she lets Amanda find them. “Do you?”

Amanda doesn’t answer. Not with words, anyway. She just crosses over to the bed, sits down next to Berlin, and drapes an arm over her shoulders. It’s not exactly a hug, and she doesn’t try to turn it into one; it’s just a gesture, a moment of contact and a gentle reminder that Berlin is not alone, that neither of them are.

Saying it aloud would be a waste of breath. They both know that. Berlin wouldn’t believe her if she said the words, if she stood up and gave another one of her pretty speeches, if she played Madame Mayor or Madame Madam or any of the half-dozen roles she plays in this shtakhole of a town. They both know she needs more than that, and maybe Amanda understands just how meaningless those hollow words are to someone like Berlin, someone who is struggling just to hold herself together, who can scarcely see the world around her right now, much less sit up and listen to what it has to say.

There’s so much she could say, so much either one of them could say. But where would it get them in the end? Berlin has never been one for fancy words, never been one for putting her feelings or experiences into something that can be misinterpreted; it always scared her, the thought of giving intangible things a shape and a form and a definition. She’s an action girl, (and, very occasionally, a feelings girl), and she doesn’t have the talent to turn her behaviour into something that can be understood, something that people might hear. She only knows how to do things, not say them.

Amanda is the one who talks. Amanda is the one with the fancy words and the pretty speeches, the one who can draw sense out of the chaos in other people’s heads, who can make tangible those intangible things Berlin thinks and feels and does. She’s the one who could turn _‘I wish I was dead’_ into something poetic, something powerful.

She doesn’t, though. Not this time. She just sits there in silence, offers her presence and nothing more, and lets Berlin take what she wants from that, from the arm around her shoulder and the places where their limbs touch. Silence says more than either of them can, even Amanda with all her talent, and so she lets the moment be all the conversation they need, wordless and companionable, the contact saying _‘you’re not alone’_ and _‘I’m here,’_ and the silence saying all the things Berlin doesn’t want to hear.

When she does finally break the moment, it’s with a warm smile and a change of subject. She squeezes Berlin’s shoulder, leans back a little, and says “You can stay here, you know.”

Berlin doesn’t smile back, but she doesn’t pull away either. It’s a compromise, of a sort. “Here? In the brothel?”

“In the brothel, yes.” Amanda chuckles. “I’m sure we can afford to give away one room. You’re housebroken, right?”

Berlin rolls her eyes, and thinks about it. Living in a brothel like the worst kind of anti-hero, coasting through her days by the gasps and groans of other people’s sex. The constant noise, the chatter of people in the bar downstairs, of music and laughter and clinking glasses, of pleasure bleeding through the walls, people coming and going at all hours of the night and day. A person would have to be crazy or desperate to live in a place like this if they didn’t work here, but she can’t deny there’s something oddly comforting in the thought.

For a start, she wouldn’t be alone. This place is always alive, even in the dead of night, and Berlin is more tempted than she’d ever admit by the idea of never being far away from other people, from lost and lonesome losers like her, broken down and desperate for something to fill the holes inside themselves, and from soft-hearted souls like Amanda, the ones kind enough to offer their bodies for the task.

Berlin has never been one for solitude. That particular virtue was beaten out of her back when she was was a kid, learning again and again that being alone meant being scared and hungry and lost, that it meant being vulnerable. It didn’t help that by the time she joined the E-Rep she was starving for it, starving for those soldiers who became her brothers and sisters, who became a new kind of family, people she could depend on, people who made sure she got a meal in her belly, who made sure she got warm clothing for the winter, who made sure she always had somewhere to sleep at night. _People_ , the kind she’d never thought she’d know again, and is it any wonder that being alone still scares her to death?

Solitude has always been a horrible thing, frightening and full of uncertainty. Maybe she should have outgrown that feeling by now, left that scared helpless kid far behind her, but she hasn’t. A lifetime later, and the terror still takes her by the throat every time she looks around and finds no-one at her back.

The people of Defiance are nothing like her E-Rep family. She won’t find a substitute here, and she knows it. This town is damn so insular, so closed-off and preoccupied with itself and its inhabitants, and it doesn’t take kindly to even the friendliest outsiders. A one-time enemy like Berlin can’t look to them to keep her warm or safe or fed. She knows she can’t count on these people for anything, but what does that matter when she can’t count on her E-Rep family any more either? This town and its people might not care about her, might even think that she deserves worse than what she got, but at least they wouldn’t have her tossed out into the cold and the rain just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Well. Maybe they would, but it’s easy to believe the best when Amanda is smiling at her like she hangs the goddamn mood. Easy to imagine that she might still hold sway over the people _she_ calls family.

“A brothel,” Berlin says again, testing the word on her tongue.

“A change of scenery,” Amanda counters. It’s a gentle kind of encouragement, a twist in the word to make it a little more palatable. “Won’t find any E-Rep barracks in here. No badges, no titles. A few soldiers sometimes, maybe… but believe me, they don’t stay in their uniforms for very long.” She leans in to nudge Berlin’s shoulder. “Come on. Don’t you think this is exactly the sort of change you need?”

Berlin doesn’t deny that. Amanda’s clothes might not fit her, but maybe there are some pieces of her lifestyle that can. At the very least, the room doesn’t chafe or cut off her circulation, and the door doesn’t doesn’t bend or warp when she tries to squeeze her way through.

It’s a thousand miles away from where she imagined she’d be at this point in her life, a thousand miles away from where she wanted to be, but hell, at least it’s something. It’s the sound of people, the cling and clatter of happy chaos all around her. It’s the thrum and the hum, the heartbeat of a place that is, in every possible sense of the word, _alive_ , a place that might keep her alive too if she lets it, if she can find it in herself to want that.

She’s not sure she’s ready to want it just yet. It still hurts to think too hard about breathing, to think of carving out a space for herself to live between those breaths that come so hard. It hurts so much, and she’s not ready to look around an over-decorated room and see a home, to listen to the clamour of a brothel and think of its people as hers. She’s not ready to want those things, not ready to step back and think about the world around her, the life that’s trying to force itself into her lungs.

It hurts, all that stuff that still has her by the throat, all those feelings that make her choke and shake, that make her wish she wasn’t alive at all. It hurts, yes, more than she’ll ever be able to admit out loud, but she is so damn scared of what will happen when she lets that pain go, what she’ll become on the morning she wakes up without wishing she hadn’t. Tommy’s dead but Berlin isn’t, and she is definitely not ready to believe that that might be okay.

Amanda touches her shoulder, then leans in until their faces are almost touching too. Berlin squeezes her eyes shut, tries to block out the sight of her, to paper over the softness in her smile with darker things, with the memory of Reverie, with gunshots and screams, with frozen air tearing through her lungs while a hundred E-Rep bullets tore through someone else’s flesh. Amanda’s breath is warm and sweet against her cheek; Berlin can feel her strength even with her eyes closed, even with her heart and her head six miles away. She doesn’t need to see her, doesn’t need to reach out and touch her. Even with all of her senses shut off she knows that she’s there, and she cannot hide from so much warmth.

“Hey,” Amanda says again. The word echoes, a ricochet of shrapnel that softens before it hits. “It’s just a room.”

But it’s not really, is it?

Berlin reminds herself to breathe, to keep breathing, reminds herself that she can’t die in here, can’t die in front of Amanda, who cares so much and doesn’t deserve any of this. She tries to say _‘thank you,’_ tries to tell Amanda that she appreciates the gesture and the meaning behind that, that she is grateful for all her kindness, but she can’t say it any more than she can feel it, any more than she can bring herself to be grateful for anything right now.

She feels like she’s floating, drowning in an endless swamp of nothing, like even the warmest sweetest things in the whole damn world are too painful, too sharp where she’s too sensitive, like compassion and sympathy turn to poison inside of her, boiling in her blood and burning in her belly. She feels like a horrible person, an ingrate and a coward and a hundred worse things, like a thankless, soulless asshole who refuses to accept a gift even when it’s offered freely.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbles. “I’m sorry, Amanda, I’m sorry…”

Amanda has no idea what the hell she’s apologising for, of course, but she’s thoughtful enough not to ask. She doesn’t say _‘you have nothing to apologise for,’_ either, nor does she lash out and tell Berlin that she has to be better, that she needs to grow up and move past these things that are all in her head. She just slides an arm around her waist, pulls her into a hug, and holds her close. Her nose is colder than the rest of her, pressed against the edge of Berlin’s ear, but she doesn’t say anything until Berlin flinches and tries to pull away.

“It’s just a room,” she says again. “That’s all. Just a room.”

Berlin blinks back tears, wrings her hands in her lap. Her fingers throb where they’re strapped, but the pain there isn’t nearly as bad as the ache in her throat and her jaw, the strain of trying not to break down again, of striving to be stronger than she is, stronger than she ever was, strong enough to accept Amanda and these gifts she won’t stop giving.

“I don’t know how to…” She shakes her head. “I can’t…”

Again, Amanda understands. Again she gets it, and again she knows better than to point that out in words. She squeezes Berlin’s good hand, thumb like a balm against the cracked skin where her knuckles are white. She holds her for a long trembling moment, then sweeps to her feet; she’s so graceful, lithe and beautiful and so damn near perfect that Berlin can hardly stand the sight of her.

“Look,” she says, in her clipped madam’s voice. “I’m going to leave the key on the table. Use it, don’t use it, either is just fine. Both are okay. But it’s here, and it’s not going anywhere.”

_And neither am I._

She doesn’t need to say that; she knows Berlin will hear it, and that she’ll understand. And yes, of course Berlin does. She understands the words that aren’t said, understands the sound beneath the silence. She understands a lot more than she wants to, and she wishes that she didn’t.

A part of her still wants to say _‘thank you’_ , wants it so badly that she can almost taste it. She wants to make it clear that she does hear, that she does understand all those things Amanda knows not to say, all those things she’s so afraid of hurting her with. Berlin has never felt so small in her life, so fragile and so worthless next to someone so much larger than the life she knows. She wants to say _‘thank you,’_ yes, but she’s so afraid of letting out the other sentiments too, the ones that sound like _‘I shouldn’t be here’_ and _‘why am I not dead?’_ She is so, so afraid.

“Okay,” she says instead, because she has to say something, because Amanda might not expect much but she has to expect that.

It’s not enough, not even close, but at least it’s a word. Amanda’s word, the one she won’t let go, the one that’s supposed to mean more than it does. It’s all Berlin has, the only kind of gratitude she can show. It’s as close as she can get, at least for right now, to that ever-elusive _‘thank you,’_ to wanting to be alive and wanting Amanda to see her.

Amanda smiles. Apparently, she understands unspoken words too.

“Okay,” she echoes, and lets them both pretend it is.

—


	4. Chapter 4

—

Of course she takes the room.

Amanda’s right about the change of scenery, even if it isn’t ideal, and Berlin supposes it’s for the best. In any case, it’s about the only option she has left after the E-Rep drives her out from her little corner of the barracks. They’re efficient that way, and ruthless too, and they don’t stop with the roof over her head; they take back her uniform, her footage, her cameras and equipment, everything short of the blood in her damn veins. They take back everything that ever meant anything to her, and leave her with a fistful of severance scrip and an insincere note that reads _‘thank you for your service.’_

She settles in well enough at the NeedWant. It helps that she doesn’t have much baggage: one off-duty outfit, three of Amanda’s ill-fitting shirts, and a box full of old-Earth movies she wouldn’t let them take away. The room’s bigger than anything she’s had in a very long time, and fancier too, but it works well enough as a place to put her head down.

And, yeah, it doesn’t hurt either that the NeedWant also offers certain other services. Ones she definitely can’t afford.

That doesn’t stop her, though. She purchases two of the aptly-named ‘night porters’, one after the other, and doesn’t sleep with either of them.

The first is a gorgeous, well-muscled young man; she doesn’t ask his name, and he doesn’t offer it, but of course that’s not the point, is it? The point is how he looks, and she is very particular about that. Dark skin to remind her of Tommy, long hair dyed Castithan white to remind her that he’s not, that no-one will ever be. On paper, at least, he’s perfect.

In practice, of course, it turns out quite the opposite; he’s barely out of his shirt before reality comes crashing down and she realises that she can’t go through with it. Her stomach clenches at the sight of chiselled abs and sculpted arms, and her voice shatters like glass when she cries out, yelling at him to stop before he even gets started. They pass an hour or two staring awkwardly at each other from opposite sides of the room; he tries to break the ice with silly word games, and she tries very hard not to cry, and at about two in the morning she gives up and sends him away.

The second is a woman. She’s older than Berlin but younger than Amanda, with a gentle face and a slender frame. Hot as hell, honestly, but Berlin doesn’t even bother asking her to undress. She doesn’t ask her to do anything at all, just curls up on the bed with her face to the wall, and closes her eyes. Apparently the pretty little thing has dealt with people like Berlin before, though, because that's all the prompting she needs; without so much as a word she lies down on the bed, settles in an inch or two behind her, and doesn’t touch her at all.

The intimacy, or lack of it, is painful in all the sweetest ways; Berlin chokes back tears and tries to match her pulse to the woman’s breathing. Soft, slow, steady… it’s not exactly the kind of _‘in, out, in, out’_ one would normally associate with whores in a brothel, but she doesn’t care. It’s what she needs, at least for now, and it helps her to get an hour’s sleep.

It’s not that she misses the company, she realises as she’s drifting off; it’s that the silence of solitude terrifies her in a way she wasn’t prepared for. She can’t remember the last time she was completely alone, the last time she had a room or a living space that was entirely hers. No lovers, no bunkmates or fellow soldiers, no superior officers patrolling outside the door. Nothing and nobody, just her and the panic rising in her chest. She can’t remember how to survive like that, how to live with only her own heartbeat to fill the silence and only her own breathing to keep her sane.

She was a kid the last time she had to do that, frightened and vulnerable and prone to getting herself into tight spaces she couldn’t get out of; it’s sharper than it should be, the memory of that, and keen enough for her not to want to go back there, to never want to find herself in that position again.

She’s older now, resourceful and tough, but she forgets that the moment she finds herself alone. It’s like all those long and hard-earned years just melt away, like the soldier in her just disappears and leaves behind that frightened and vulnerable little kid. It doesn’t help that things are so hard, that so much has happened to her in so short a time. Tommy, Reverie, all those things that give her nightmares, that twist in her gut and squeeze her ribs… they’re more than she could carry even on a good day, and when she’s alone that weight damn near breaks her.

It’s embarrassing. Buying whores just to keep from being alone, paying good scrip (and probably the only scrip she’ll see in a very long time) just to hear someone else breathing. It’s weak, and it’s stupid.

And yet the only thing that keeps her from doing it again the following night is the fact that Amanda comes to her room before she gets the chance.

It only takes a glance at her face to know that it’s not a social visit, that something has happened and it’s not good. Berlin’s heart leaps into her throat at the sight of her, muscles already bracing for a fresh new nightmare in the making.

Amanda is paler than usual, biting her lip like she’s trying to hold her own emotions in check for Berlin’s sake. Berlin wants to get angry, wants to shake her and say that she’s not so weak, not so damn fragile that she couldn’t handle a crack in someone else’s perfect poker face; she wants to show Amanda and herself that she can handle whatever shtako the world wants to throw at her. She can’t, of course, but oh, she wants to.

Idly, she finds herself wondering whether Amanda knows what she’s been doing (or, well, _hasn’t_ been doing) with her prostitutes. It’s the least of their worries right now, she suspects, but still the thought makes her blush.

“Berlin.” Amanda’s voice is a warning, not the kind that comes like a threat but the kind that preludes really bad news.

“Oh, no.” She tries to sound distressed, or even a little apprehensive, but at this point the best she can muster is weary resignation. Of course it’s bad news; it always is. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and pretends to care. “What is it this time?”

Amanda doesn’t wait for her to open her eyes. Maybe it’s easier this way, easier if she doesn’t have to see the look on her face when she breaks the news. “The Earth Republic is pulling out of Defiance.”

“Oh,” Berlin manages, and sits down right there in the doorway.

It shouldn’t hit like it does. Honestly, it shouldn’t even be news at all. The writing has been on the wall for days now, was probably set in motion as soon as the news broke about New York. Given the state of that city — _former_ city — and the countless other places no doubt in desperate need of E-Rep support, it was all but inevitable that Defiance would drop way down on their priority list. Still, though, hearing it put into words drives the air out of her lungs and leaves her drowning.

“I know you’re not…” Amanda sighs. Her jaw is very white. “Well. I know it doesn’t make much of a difference to you any more. But I thought… I thought you might like to know.”

Berlin swallows heavily, braces her palms against the doorjamb. _It doesn’t matter,_ she tells herself. _Who cares? They don’t want you any more, so why the hell should you want them? Why do you care where they go or what they do?_

“Yeah.” It’s not exactly forthcoming, but it’s the only word she can force out. She looks up at Amanda, finds the pain on her face too. “Pottinger too?”

Uncharacteristically, Amanda looks away. “Yeah,” she says, a hollow echo. “Him too.”

That explains the look on her face, Berlin supposes. Amanda’s dalliance with Pottinger is hardly a secret, and the betrayal burning through her is more than obvious. “Are you… uh, are you all right?”

It’s the closest she’s come to offering herself as a shoulder, to holding out a hand and offering even just a little of the endless friendship Amanda’s given her. It’s not quite what she was aiming for, but it’s a whole lot closer than she thought she could get. It feels like it should mean something, and it does to her, but apparently Amanda doesn’t feel it at all, because all of a sudden she’s glaring. Full-on, furious, _glaring_ like Berlin is single-handedly responsible for everything the E-Rep ever did.

“I have to be, don’t I?” Her voice is sharp, pitchy, like she’s fighting back tears. “This town is in no fit state to sit around waiting for some big hero in a fancy cape to swoop down from the heavens and clean up after your _jekking_ people.”

It’s displaced anger. That much is obvious, and even Berlin can tell that it’s not really directed at her at all. The accusation still stings, though, and it’s very hard not to let that show.

“My people?” she asks, very quietly.

“You know what I mean,” Amanda snaps. She’s furious, almost blind with it, and she’s lashing out; she might regret her tone in the cruel light of day tomorrow, but right now she doesn’t give a damn who she hurts. “And don’t give me that look. If they hadn’t tossed you out on your ass you’d be right there with them, riding off into the sunset and leaving the rest of us to fix the mess you left behind.”

That doesn’t just sting; it cuts right down to the bone. Berlin doesn’t know whether to be angry or upset now, whether to reel from the blow or throw a counter right back at her. In some surreal little corner of her mind, she finds that it’s almost a relief to be feeling anything at all, to actually have the strength to feel something other than lost and broken and guilty. It’s a relief to have something to fixate on, something that hurts and makes her fists twitch, but the part of her that understands that’s a good thing is incredibly small next to the part that feels like it’s been punched in the face.

“Really?” Her throat is raw. “That’s what you think of me?”

Amanda crouches in front of her. She’s bracing on the doorjamb too, but only to give herself more leverage, to hoist herself forwards and get right up in Berlin’s face. Berlin can see the fire in her, the betrayal and the hurt and the blind lashing-out rage, all the sparking little ways that this is just as personal for her as it ever was for Berlin. _I trusted him,_ her eyes are saying. _I trusted him, and look where it got me._ Heaven knows, Berlin understands that feeling, but it’s really damn hard to be sympathetic now with so much hate being thrown in her face, so much resentment and rage boiling over into something that should never have been about them at all.

“Look at me,” Amanda says; her fingers are vice-tight when they lock around Berlin’s jaw and pull her in, forcing her to meet her gaze. “Look me right in the eye and tell me you wouldn’t.”

“I…”

But of course she can’t do it. Not with any measure of honesty, anyway, and of course Amanda knows that. She releases Berlin’s jaw, swings back up to her feet, and turns away.

“Yeah.” This time, it’s as solid as stone. “That’s what I thought.”

Berlin tries to catch her breath, fumbles for something to hold onto, something to steady her. The world feels like it’s collapsing around her ears, like the tiny fragment of calm she thought she’d almost found is dissolving too, like there’s nothing left to hold her upright, nothing left to keep her from drowning in herself. Amanda’s shoulders are heaving, hands shaking where she’s supporting herself against the wall, and Berlin wants to stand up and reach for her, wants to try and be the friend she thought she could, wants to be more than the pathetic worthless coward that she knows she really is, but her legs won’t work and she can’t breathe, and the world crumbling around her is so loud that she can’t hear herself think.

“I’m sorry.” It sounds like a dying gasp, a whisper thrown into a depthless void, but it’s the truth and it’s all she has.

Amanda doesn’t turn back, doesn’t look at her, but Berlin can see her softening in places that were stronger than steel a moment ago, can see that her shoulders are still shaking and her spine isn’t as straight as it once was.

“I know you are,” she says.

But that doesn’t stop her walking away.

—

Berlin spends the night alone.

It’s awful, but in a twisted kind of way it feels fitting, like a kind of self-flagellation, punishment for an act of cowardice she never got the chance to commit, or else a sick kind of torture for letting herself wish that she could have, for grieving the loss of her family more than she resents the assholes who would leave a town to die. It’s only a moment, the feeling, but it is there just the same, and she can’t stomach the thought of sleeping away the shame by letting her heart beat in time with someone else’s breathing.

She wants to. _Oh_ , she wants to. The room is too big, too silent, too much, and it scares the hell out of her. More than anything in the world she wants to go downstairs and purchase the first pretty face she finds just to get her through it. She doesn’t, though. As desperately as she wants to, as much as the solitude frightens her, even she isn’t so heartless to take comfort from one of the very people she would have abandoned without a second thought.

Instead she crawls into bed and listens to the sound of her own breathing. It’s loud and echoey in the oversized room, and much too fast. Her pulse is racing, heart hammering like panic, like nightmares and bad memories; she presses her palms flat against the wall, lets the contact ground her just a little, and wishes it would all stop.

It bothers her, far more than she’d care to admit, that Amanda’s point was a valid one. She’s always seen herself as a good person, or at least the kind of person who tries to do the right thing; honestly, until the last few days she’s always seen the Earth Republic as good people too. They’re the ones protecting the innocent, keeping them safe, defending them from the raiders and outlaws who would tear them apart just for looking at them funny. It’s always been so damn simple, but it’s not any more, and the look on Amanda’s face haunts her all through the night.

It’s true, isn’t it? If they hadn’t forced her hand, she’d still be thinking that way. If she still had her uniform, if she still had the right to call herself a soldier, she’d do what she was told and never think to question it, turn tail and run and never even spare a thought for the poor souls they’re leaving behind to choke on their dust, helpless and frightened and completely unprotected. It would never have even occurred to her to think about them at all. She and Tommy would have rolled out with a salute and a shrug, and never looked back.

Amanda knows her entirely too well, it seems, or else maybe Berlin isn’t as good at hiding her insecurities as she’s always assumed. Easy to think you’re invisible, she supposes, when you’re the one behind the cameras and everyone else is in front. But apparently Amanda has some hidden lenses of her own, because she sees everything Berlin has always tried not to see in herself. She sees the coward with her head in the sand, the _‘yes, sir’_ soldier who never dares to question anything, who does what she’s told without hesitation, who would leave a town to its destruction before she’d risk upsetting her superior officers.

Amanda knows exactly the kind of person Berlin is, the kind of person she’s probably always been, hiding behind bullshtak like _‘the right thing’_ and _‘for your protection.’_ She knows everything there is to know about the person she used to be, and neither one of them has the strength or the patience to give a fair shot to the person she’s becoming.

She tosses and turns through the night, slips in and out of half-sleep, deep enough to dream but not enough to feel rested, waking every time with her whole body twisted into some new impossible position. She dreams of E-Rep gun barrels, locked and loaded and pointed at her face; she dreams of Amanda’s words in Tommy’s voice, of Irisa’s knives in Nolan’s hands. She dreams of her family too, for the first time in years; she can barely remember her mother’s face, or her brother’s, but she remembers that they were her whole damn world; she remembers that world, a colourful child’s world, and the world that came after. She dreams of herself at eight years old, at nine and ten and on and on, starving and shivering and scared, and then at sixteen, staring down at her first hot meal in nearly a decade. She dreams and wakes and dreams again, and the night stretches out forever.

It’s really, really early when she stumbles down to the bar. Early enough that it’s still dark and deathly silent even outside. No-one’s up yet; the chairs are stacked, floors swept, bottles lined up and gleaming behind the bar. It’s the neatest and tidiest she’s ever seen this place, and it almost feels like a shame to ruin it with her presence. She’s an exposed nerve, all haunted tremors and sleepy half-yawns, and the clothes that still refuse to fit her body feel so out of place in a space as clean as this.

She rummages around behind the bar, not after the liquor for once but for something to amuse herself. It’s more by luck than judgement that she stumbles on a deck of cards, no doubt confiscated from some cheating patron or another. They’re human cards, the kind with numbers she can count and faces that she almost recognises. She doesn’t know any card games designed for one person, so she plays against an imaginary opponent instead, a vision of the old Berlin, the one who still wears a captain’s stripes, who can still fit into her clothes, who shares barracks with other soldiers and doesn’t need to worry about loneliness or being woken in the middle of the night by childish nightmares.

They play gin rummy, then blackjack. The other Berlin wins every time, but that’s no surprise. She always does.

It’s just starting to get light outside when Amanda and Bailey show up. They wander in from the back, clearly in no hurry to get the place fit for opening. Given how quiet it is, Berlin can hardly blame them. They’re both in seemingly decent moods, chatting and chuckling about nothing in particular, but they get very quiet very quickly when they find Berlin sitting there glaring daggers at an empty chair.

Berlin doesn’t trust herself to look up. She keeps her eyes on the other Berlin, like it’s the most normal and natural thing in the world. She doesn’t say anything, but she wants to.

Amanda doesn’t say anything either. Bailey, bless her sweet bartender’s heart, senses the discomfort and does the honours for them. “You know there’s no-one there, right?” she asks, cocking her head at the other Berlin’s chair, the one with cards and winnings stacked high. “Not judging, just saying. Takes a special kind of talent to lose that much scrip to a chair.”

Berlin still doesn’t look at them. “What can I say?” she shrugs. “I’m a talented woman.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Amanda quips.

It doesn’t take a genius to sense that something is very wrong between them, and Bailey is quick to catch it. “Want me to go take a walk, boss?”

“I’d appreciate that,” Amanda says.

She doesn’t take her eyes off Berlin even for a moment, but her expression is softer than she expected, and her shoulders aren’t nearly as tight as they were when she walked away last night. Berlin keeps her head down, as much the product of shame as anything else; she occupies herself with the cards, putting the deck back together and shuffling again and again and again. It keeps her hands busy, and gives her something to look at, something for both of them to focus on. An ice-breaker, or as much of one as they can hope for.

“I was going to put them back,” she says, and cocks her head at the bar.

Amanda quirks a brow. “I’m sure you were.”

She doesn’t wait for an invitation; the instant the words are out of her mouth she’s dropping down into the other Berlin’s chair. She doesn’t say anything, just leans forward with her elbows on the table, like she’s waiting to be dealt a hand. Berlin can feel her staring, but she keeps her head down. She doesn’t trust herself not to fall apart if she gets a look at her face, her eyes. She doesn’t trust her stupid sleep-deprived brain not to break down completely at the memory of disappointing her.

Thankfully, Amanda seems to sense how fragile she is, and keeps a little space between them; she’s leaning forward on her arms, but she doesn’t push too far, and she’s careful to leave as much space between them as Berlin needs. It’s an olive branch, of sorts, and it bolsters Berlin to break the silence, to breathe in deep and lift her head.

“Feeling better this morning?” Her voice hitches, but it’s good enough.

Amanda’s breathing is laboured as well, if not quite as much. “A little.” She closes her eyes, lets the breath out in a long sigh. “Look. What I said last night…”

“Forget about it.” She blurts it out so fast she didn’t even realise she wanted to say it, a rush of words that really means _‘I don’t want to talk about it.’_

Amanda, of course, doesn’t listen. “No. I was out of line. You didn’t deserve any of that.”

“Yeah, I did.” Berlin sighs too, lets Amanda see and hear just how exhausted she is. “You were right, and I’m not going to pretend you weren’t. If I was still one of them, if they still wanted me, we both know I would’ve been gone in a heartbeat.”

Amanda doesn’t bother to deny it. “We both know that,” she acknowledges. “But I shouldn’t have thrown it in your face like I did. I shouldn’t have…” She sighs again, and Berlin flinches back a bit, inexplicably afraid of what’s coming. “Look. The point is, it shouldn’t matter now. You’re _not_ one of them, not any more. God knows, it’s hard enough getting thrown out of a place you thought you were safe, and I shouldn’t have held it over your head like I did, what you might have done—”

“ _Would_ have done,” Berlin corrects, because it feels important.

“—what you _might_ have done if they’d kept you around,” Amanda finishes, ignoring her. “We can’t hold everyone to ransom over every little decision they might have made if things had turned out a little differently. We can only work with what we’ve got in the moment, and it was unfair of me to throw your history in your face like that. I was angry and upset, and you were…”

“…an easy target?”

Amanda doesn’t shy away from it. She doesn’t even blink. Ugly though it might be, it is the truth. “Yeah.”

Berlin blinks back tears. It stings, but not as badly as all the ways she understands. “I get it too, you know.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“I do.” Despite her best efforts to hold herself steady, her voice still cracks, and she ends up sounding very young. “You and Pottinger, it’s not exactly a secret. And it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that it’s not just the E-Rep vanishing that’s got you pissed.” She wants to say _‘I’m here for you, like you’ve been here for me,’_ but she’s not sure she can be, not sure she has the strength to make that many words. She doesn’t want to offer something she can’t give, so she just bites down on her lip instead, and says “I get it,” over and over again.

Amanda catches her wrist, catches her eye. “Thank you,” she says.

The contact is striking, startling. It makes her want to flinch again, want to run away and hide. Amanda might have a point about not being bound by her history, but some things aren’t easily changed, and apparently cowardice is one of them. She wants to disappear just like the E-Rep, wants to turn tail and run away from this nightmare of a town, leave its people and its problems, leave everything that ever hurt her and start fresh in some distant city in the middle of nowhere, somewhere with work and people who have never heard of Berlin.

She is so damn scared of the things she sees when Amanda looks at her, so damn scared of the things it makes her want to do, want to be. Defiance isn’t her home, Amanda isn’t her family, but she’s looking at her like this is normal, like this is how families fight, like this is what people do to show how much they care about each other. And maybe it is; Berlin wouldn’t know. The Earth Republic might not be the only family she’s ever had, but it’s the only one she remembers. She has no frame of reference for moments like this, nothing to hold Amanda up against and think _yes_ or _no_. It makes her feel broken, and it terrifies her beyond words.

“I’m sorry,” she blurts out, just like a thousand times before. It’s the only thing she can get out, the only thing that comes even close to what she’s really feeling. “I’m sorry I’m still… I’m sorry that I don’t… that I can’t…”

Amanda smiles, sad but strong. “It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not.” Berlin doesn’t tell her that it’s still there, the urge to run, to flee, to find a new home before anyone here can memorise her face. She doesn’t tell her that shtako like that doesn’t disappear, that you can’t just take away a lifetime of grief like you can take away a badge and a rank. “Amanda, I’m not… I don’t think I’ll ever be the sort of person this town needs.”

“No-one’s asking you to be,” Amanda says. “God, Jess, you’ve just had to watch everything you’ve ever known get flushed down the toilet. That’s not the sort of thing you just bounce back from, and even if it was you’re still an outsider. No-one’s looking to you for anything. Hell, we’re not even asking you to stick around.” Every line on her body is telling a different story, though, and Berlin can’t take her eyes off the places where her shirt is creased. “You think this town cares if you stay or go? Think again. We’ve got bigger things to worry about.”

It’s calloused, but true enough, and Berlin flushes. “I know that.”

“Good.” She’s very serious. “You want out? That’s just fine with us. You want to run away with the rest of those E-Rep assholes, beg them to take you back? You go right ahead. No-one here will shed a tear for you.”

“I don’t want them to,” Berlin says, but it’s more than she can do to explain why. Maybe she doesn’t know; all she knows for sure is that, in a weird sort of way, the indifference helps.

“So go, then. No-one’s stopping you.” There’s an odd kind of gleam in Amanda’s eye, like her words don’t really tally with her feelings; despite everything she’s saying, Berlin can tell that she still doesn’t believe it. The faith she has is devastating, and it’s something she’s never known before. “You know where the exit is. Hell, I’ll even buy you a shirt that fits.”

Berlin has forgotten how to breathe. “I can’t do that.”

“Sure you can. As soon as Niles is gone, I’ll get the mayor’s office back. No-one else is clamouring for that position, trust me.” She doesn’t point out that it’s hypothetical, that she doesn’t know for sure, no more than Berlin knows where she’ll go from here. “I can call in a couple of favours if you want, get you a nice cushy office job. Texas, Iowa, anywhere you want. You can live out the rest of your days behind some nice hardwood desk, hiding under other people’s paperwork and pretending to be happy.”

“I don’t want that,” Berlin says. Even just thinking about it makes her stomach hurt. “Amanda, please…”

“Please what?” She sounds angry, but a glance at her face makes it really obvious it’s all an act. “You’re the one insisting that you’d turn around and run away given half a chance. Well, now you’ve got it. Take it. Prove you’re the same E-Rep opportunist you were when you first arrived. Prove you’re only interested in the bottom line, the money shot and the big dramatic story. Run away like Niles and the rest, and prove you’re just like them. I’m giving you a free ticket here, Jessica.”

“Don’t call me that,” she snaps. The words rasp in her throat like the edge of an Irathient blade. “It’s _Berlin_.”

“No, I don’t think it is.” Amanda’s eyes are coldfire-bright. “And I don’t think you’re going anywhere.”

—

She’s right, of course.

Well, what did she expect? Berlin doesn’t even have the courage to leave her room in the brothel most of the time, much less flee the whole damn town, and it’s a long, long way to Iowa or Texas or wherever else. Even with all the help Amanda not-so-sincerely offered, how the hell is she supposed to get there when she can scarcely even get out of bed in the morning?

So, no, she doesn’t go anywhere. She stays in Defiance, not because she’s brave, not because she’s doing the right thing, not for any of the reasons Amanda sees when she looks at her, but because she’s too much of a goddamned coward to even try and make her way in a world that clearly wants her to suffer. She’s weak and pathetic and so damn _scared_ , and she hates that all Amanda sees is someone willing to stand up and do the right thing, someone learning to care about a town she used to hate.

It’s not easy, sticking around, though she consoles herself that it’s easier than the alternative. She spends the last of her scrip on new clothes and old booze, and pretends it doesn’t scare the hell out of her every time her wallet gets a little lighter. She pretends it doesn’t scare her when the E-Rep disappears too, when the soldiers leave the barracks and the stasis nets go down to let them out. She pretends she isn’t flat-out terrified when Pottinger evacuates the mayor’s office and Amanda steps up to fill his shoes. For Amanda’s sake, so much more than her own, she pretends.

The people have more faith in Amanda than Berlin has ever had in anyone. No-one opposes her, and the way they rally around her when she steps up to claim the big fancy chair is awe-inspiring; in all her life, Berlin has never seen anything like it. They’re practically falling over themselves in their rush to offer their congratulations and applause, to call her ‘Madame Mayor’ and smile and shake her hand. It should be sickening, the flood of affection and faith, but it’s not. It rips a hole right through her chest, makes her ache in places she’d thought she buried long ago. It makes her think of home, of all the places she let herself believe might be.

The next time they get a few minutes together, a modest lunch in the NeedWant that neither of them touches, Amanda says “You can still work for me, you know.”

Berlin grimaces, glances down at the table. It’s too heavy, too solid, too much of too many things. Like everything else in this town it’s weather-beaten and battered, worn down by one too many long winters, but it’s still somehow sturdier and stronger than anything she’s ever had for her own. It makes her feel trapped, unsafe, and she finds herself reaching automatically for the holster at her hip, the gun she used to keep strapped to her side, the safety and security of being armed and protected. It’s stupid, she knows — she hasn’t worn the holster, much less then gun, since the E-Rep cut her loose — but it’s more than she can do to fight the instinct when it rises. 

It used to bring her comfort, finding the weapon there, finding _something_ there; it was a tangible reminder of who she was, who she’d made herself, or maybe just a twisted sort of security blanket, another one of those childhood instincts she never quite learned to let go. Used to, yes, but it’s not there any more, is it? No holster, no gun, no stupid security blanket. Just flailing fingers and an empty space, and Amanda’s quirked eyebrow.

She clears her throat, fights to keep the rising panic on the inside. “I’m not sure owning a brothel would suit me any better than working in one,” she says. Her voice is rough, and her throat is very sore. “But, uh, nice of you to offer.”

Amanda keeps her expression neutral. “I wasn’t talking about the NeedWant,” she says. “That place can run itself.”

True enough, probably. Berlin catches her breath, swallows over some of the hoarseness. “Then what?”

“Whatever you like,” Amanda says simply. She’s smiling, but very carefully, like she’s afraid of causing irreparable damage if she offers too much of anything. Berlin wonders when she became so fragile, so visibly weak. “Got a lot of positions opening up now that the E-Rep is gone. No shortage of things to do around here.”

“Uh.” Berlin swallows again. Clearing her throat didn’t help at all; it feels like it’s closing up, like she’s about to start choking. “Like what?”

“Well.” Amanda’s voice hitches too, like this is more personal than it has any right to be. “We need a lawkeeper, for one.”

And now Berlin does choke. The panic is dangerously close to the surface, pressing down on her larynx, and it doesn’t help that Amanda’s looking at her like this is her future, like she’s supposed to look around this place and see a new home, a new family, a new life for herself. It’s like all of a sudden this is _it_ , like Amanda’s presenting her with all the broken pieces of her life and telling her to put them together in a different shape, to replace her old names with new ones, _soldier_ with _lawkeeper_ and _Berlin_ with _Defiance_.

It’s beyond frightening. She’s never had that freedom before, not once in her whole damn life. She was just a child when she was left alone, struggling and scrabbling just to survive, and she joined the Earth Republic the instant she hit sixteen, not because she was so damn patriotic or believed so damn fervently in what they were trying to do, but because they were the only people in the whole wide world who were willing to take her in, the only people who would have anything to do with her at all. They gave her food, clothes, a job and a purpose; they gave her everything she’d ever need to stay alive, not because she wanted them or believed in them but because she had nowhere else to go. She had no choice.

Now she does. The choice is sitting right in front of her: lawkeeper, maybe, or something else, or somewhere else, anything and anywhere and anyone she wants to be. There are so many choices, so many, and sitting here with Amanda, seeing them spread out in front of her, she realises that she has no idea how to make one.

It hits harder than she expects it to, slams into her like a blow, like the butt of someone’s shotgun, and she finds herself doubled over the table, heaving and gasping for air.

 _I can’t work here,_ she thinks, head spinning. _I can’t defend this town. I shouldn’t even be here. I should be out there with the E-Rep, or dead in Camp Reverie. I should be dead, I should be dead, I should be dead. I can’t be here. I can’t live here when I shouldn’t be alive. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t…_

“Jessica?” Amanda sounds worried. “Jess?”

She closes her eyes, breathes through her nose as best she can, and forces herself to speak. “Can you… _please_ , can you just call me Berlin?”

She needs it. She can’t say why, doesn’t really understand her own screwed-up thinking, but she knows that she needs it. This town has taken everything from her; she can’t let it take that.

“Okay.” Amanda’s voice is low, and very close to her ear. “Okay, all right. Berlin.”

 _Thank you,_ she thinks, but she still can’t say it.

“It’s okay,” Amanda says, like she always does when they know it’s not. “It was just a suggestion. I’m not asking you to sign a contract in blood or anything.”

“Good,” Berlin says sadly. “Don’t have any left to give anyway.”

Amanda sighs. “Well, you don’t have to. It’s not complicated. It’s not some kind of permanent life-binding pact. It’s nothing like that, I promise you. It’s as simple as this: I need skilled workers; you’re skilled, and at least for the time being you need work. That’s all. Okay?”

Berlin nods, relishes the rough scrape of the table against her cheek. The cut under her eye is almost fully healed by now, and the bruises are gone completely; the last lingering revenants of Reverie are all but vanished from her face, and she wonders if the memory will vanish as well when they do.

“Okay,” she says, clinging to the word like she would cling to Amanda herself if she only had the strength or the faith or the courage.

“The town isn’t going anywhere,” Amanda says. “And neither is the job. But that doesn’t mean you’re bound by the same rules. You want to hop on the first land-coach out to Texas or Iowa, that’s just fine, and that offer is still open too. But as long as you’re here, you might as well make yourself useful.”

Berlin doesn’t have the stomach to tell her that it’s not about that. It’s not about tying herself down in a town that hates her, a town she used to hate too; it’s not about making a place a home in a way she’s never had the luxury to do before. She doesn’t have the guts to say that it isn’t really about the place at all, that it would be just as hard to keep breathing in Texas or Iowa or any other shtakhole where Amanda could call in her so-called ‘favours’. It’s about all the places; it’s about the goddamn world, and the fact that she’s still in it.

“I don’t know what to say,” It’s the truest thing she’s said in days.

Amanda chuckles. “Well, a _‘thank you’_ would be a nice start.”

It’s meant as a joke, Berlin knows, but it doesn’t feel like one when she knows that she can’t say it, when the words lodge in her throat like stones, like Amanda is trying to choke her with guilt and shame and all the things she can’t do, all the things she wants to do, wants to be, wishes she could reach. She wants to offer that stupid simple _‘thank you’_ , wants to say _‘I’ll do anything you want, just don’t leave me alone.’_ She wants to give herself to Amanda completely, as unconditional and compassionate as Amanda has been for her. But she can’t. She _can’t_.

“Amanda…” The table muffles the name.

 _I can’t,_ she thinks. _I’m sorry, I’m so sorry_.

“Hey.” Amanda presses a warm palm to the back of her neck, fingers playing with the hair at the nape. “You can’t stay in there forever.” 

It takes Berlin a moment to realise that she’s not talking about the little room upstairs but the place inside her head, the dark space that whispers _‘you shouldn’t be here’_ and _‘you should be dead,’_ even in moments when she almost feels alive.

“I can try,” she says.

“Berlin.” It’s another sigh, frustrated and so damn tired. “You survived. Tommy didn’t. It happened, and you can’t take it back. You can’t undo it by wishing, and we both know he’d hate to see you wasting away like this, scared to live your life because you think he should have lived his instead.”

“He _should_ have,” Berlin snaps. It’s only after the words are out, only when Amanda’s palm twitches against her neck that she realises how close she is to actually saying all of those awful things she feels. “He was good and kind, and I’m neither of those things. I’m washed-up and wasted and worthless. He had his whole damn life ahead of him, and I…”

“You do too.” Amanda leans in, close enough that Berlin feels her lips shape the words against her skin. “I don’t know how old you think you are, Jess, but…”

Berlin doesn’t bother correcting the name. She just laughs, raspy and tearful, and shakes her head. “A hundred?”

Amanda laughs too. “Well, then, I won’t even ask how old you think _I_ am.”

“Younger than I’ve ever been.” It’s sad, but the wryness helps her to keep breathing.

“I don’t think so,” Amanda says, and sobers. “But that’s not really the point, is it?”

“I guess not.”

Amanda does’t let the pain in her voice sway her; she keeps going, cold and harsh. “The point is, Tommy would have hated to see you like this. Defiance was his home, and you were…” She trails off, probably because she’s not entirely sure what they were to each other at the end. That’s fair enough, Berlin supposes; she’s not really sure herself. That’s a big part of what makes it so painful. “Well, you meant a hell of a lot to him. Don’t you think he’d want to know you’re taken care of?”

“I was taken care of,” Berlin mutters. “Until the people who had my back decided they didn’t want it any more.”

Amanda’s breath stutters against the side of her head, like she wants to throw out some hollow reassurance or another. Berlin can hear the words already, the hum in the back of her throat, the softness in her lips. _‘I still have your back’_ and _‘this town can take care of you, if you’d just take care of it as well.’_ Empty, pointless things that hurt when she thinks of them, and Berlin doesn’t give her a chance to get them out. She can’t hear it, can’t stand the thought of it. It gnaws in her stomach like days without food, catches in her throat like days without water, and she hates that even now she remembers exactly what those things feel like.

“Don’t…” The word echoes like a prayer. “Don’t say it. Please.”

“You have to hear it some time,” Amanda says, so brutally gentle.

“I know.” She does, really and truly. But it’s so damn hard, knowing these things, and her head is so full of those awful feelings that Tommy wouldn’t have wanted for her. “I know that, Amanda, I do. And some other time, maybe. But not…”

She squeezes her eyes shut, chokes down a few deep breaths. More than anything in the world right now, she wants to open herself up, let Amanda see all those things she can’t stop thinking and feeling and being, let her see all the reasons why those things are still churning inside of her, all the reasons why she can’t just let them go like Tommy would have wanted her to. It’s like a weight bearing down on her, endless and too much to endure, but how to make someone else understand how it feels to be so wrong?

Her family died, but she didn’t. Tommy died, but she didn’t. Half the prisoners in Camp Reverie died, but she didn’t. The people who kept her alive for her entire adult life threw her away like so much trash, and still she didn’t die.

The Earth Republic was her whole damn world. They took her in, yeah, and took care of her, but it was so much more than that. They were soldiers, unstoppable forces fighting to keep people like her safe. They were strong and brave, and when she put on that uniform, for the first time in her life she wondered if maybe she could be strong and brave as well. And somehow, through some impossible miracle, they made her that way. They gave her a gun, taught her how to use it, how to protect the people who couldn’t defend themselves, how to stand up against the alien threat, the raider bastards who killed the people she loved, how to make sure that never happened again. They taught her to be a soldier just like them, and then they lined her up with a group of terrified convicts and tried to blow her brains out.

She didn’t die. Again and again she stepped over the corpses of good people, and didn’t die. Again and again she survived to grieve and mourn and hurt, and she is so damn scared of seeing it happen all over again. She is so damn scared of _caring_ , because she knows what happens every time she does. She is so damn scared of losing any more people she thought were her family, so damn scared of surviving to bury any more pieces of her heart, and how does she even start trying to explain that to someone as soft and loving as Amanda? How does she put into words the fact that _that_ is why she can’t hear those words, _that_ is why she can’t let someone else say they’ve got her back? Because every time they do, every time she thinks that they do…

Amanda is so sweet, so thoughtful. She cares so deeply and gives away so much of herself. More than anyone Berlin has ever met, she seems to truly believe that softness can save, that caring can make all the nightmares go away… but it can’t, and it won’t, and Berlin has no idea how to make her see that everything she’s offering is everything that terrifies her.

“I can’t,” she says at last, a broken end to a broken plea. “Not yet. Not…”

She closes her eyes, sees Tommy’s smile and the blurred edges of her mother’s face, sees the shadows of her brother’s hands and the shapeless bodies piled up in Reverie. She struggles against the waves of pain, cruel and razor-edged and never-ending, and she doesn’t finish.

Amanda squeezes the back of her neck, firm and grounding. “I get it,” she says.

“No, I don’t think you do.” She tries. She tries so damn hard. “I don’t _deserve_ this, Amanda. I don’t… I’m not…”

Amanda chuckles. It’s a low, throaty sound, more compassion than amusement, and it makes Berlin turn and look at her, find the light in her eyes, the tenderness that brings her back here, back to her side again and again, the softness and the caring that almost, _almost_ makes her want this thing, this not-family, this one-sided friendship, that almost makes her want to be more than what she is, almost makes her believe again… that makes her _want_ and then in the very next second drives the air out of her lungs. There is so much in Amanda, heartache and loss that matches Berlin’s almost perfectly, but something else as well, a kind of strength she’s never known, a kind of strength she will never, ever possess.

“I do get it.” Her lips press like a bandage to Berlin’s mostly-healed cheek. “Believe me, I do. But it’s not…” She exhales, deep and slow and incredibly tired. “It’s not for us to decide what we deserve, or what anyone else does. It’s not for us to decide who cares about us, or when they die, or when we do. We don’t get to decide any of that, and you know what? We _shouldn’t_. It’s not our right to make those decisions. All we get to do is accept them, live with them, and do the best we can with what we get.” Her hand drops down from Berlin’s neck, finds her hand under the table. “Whether we deserve it or not.”

Berlin swallows hard, tries take it all in, the press of skin on skin and the promise hiding underneath. It terrifies her.

“I don’t think I know how to do that,” she whispers. Admitting it aloud makes her feel like a coward, worthless and incompetent and so undeserving of someone like Amanda. “I don’t even know where to start.”

Amanda’s smile is radiant. “You can start by taking the job.”

—


	5. Chapter 5

—

She tells herself it’s only temporary.

_‘Provisional,’_ Amanda calls it, more to calm Berlin’s nerves than because she really believes that shtak. _“You can leave any time you want,”_ she says, not because she wants her to but because she knows Berlin needs to hear it, knows that she needs to know there’s a door always open. She’s not tied down here, no-one’s forcing her to stay, and Amanda is so damn good at making sure she doesn’t forget it.

In an odd sort of way, it seems to mean almost as much to Amanda as it does to Berlin, knowing that she’s here of her own free will, that she’s sticking around because she wants to, not because some clever-tongued mayor bound her hands.

It makes her keep a distance, though. _Temporary_. She holds herself apart from the people she’s supposed to be protecting, keeps herself as far removed from the job as she can while still doing it. She doesn’t let them call her _lawkeeper_ — she tells them _“it’s Berlin,”_ over and over, and doesn’t care that they hate the name as much as the soldier who used to wear it — and she definitely doesn’t wear the badge. She sits in the office sometimes, and she tries to keep an ear pressed to her hailer, but most of the time she stays far away from anything that might mark her out as someone who belongs here.

Playing a small-town lawkeeper isn’t exactly the kind of work she’s used to doing for the E-Rep. If her camera hand wasn’t still held together by surgical tape, she’s pretty sure she’d be jonesing for some good footage right about now. A good story, a good angle for a great shot… anything to keep her mind sharp, anything to keep her from thinking about where she is and whose shoes she’s supposed to be filling.

They arm her to the damn teeth. A handgun, a shotgun, full access to the armoury, the whole works. She can’t express in words how good it feels to have a weapon in her hands again at last.

She keeps the handgun under her pillow at night. It’s stupid, she knows, and more than a little dangerous even when it’s not loaded, but it makes her feel safer than she has in days. Hell, if she’s really honest, she probably feels safer than she has in weeks, since Tommy kicked her to the curb because keeping secrets about Irisa was more important than honesty and trust and teamwork, because he didn’t have the balls or the guts or the heart to just tell her the goddamn truth and protect them both. She feels so safe with a gun always in reach, safe with the barrel digging in against the side of her head, safe with her fingers wrapped around the grip, safe when she reaches up and hugs the stupid thing like a kid with a stuffed animal. She feels kind of pathetic too, but it’s worth it for the way the silly thing lulls her to sleep, the way it keeps the nightmares away.

The gun might make her feel better, but the job definitely doesn’t. It makes her feel like an imposter, like some asshole poseur pretending to be someone she’s not, like she’s trying to replace Nolan in their hearts or something. She’s not — that’s the last thing in the world she wants — but it’s harder than she’d ever admit to shake the feeling. 

She doesn’t fail to notice the way Amanda looks at her when she raises the subject, doesn’t miss the shadows under her eyes every time she tries to convince Berlin to wear the damn badge; she doesn’t miss the way that hurts nearly as much as the memory of Pottinger’s ass in her fancy chair. Amanda’s evasive, more so than usual, and she never quite meets her eye when they talk about it. Berlin knows that she isn’t really seeing her, no more than she was that night the E-Rep decided to leave; Amanda’s thoughts are on Nolan, the last one to wear that badge, and Pottinger, the last one to fill the chair, but still she talks about it like it’s not about them at all, goes through the motions with Berlin, mayor and lawkeeper, like she really believes either one of them could ever play those parts.

“They need to know you,” she says, maybe the hundredth time they discuss it. To her credit, she doesn’t insult either of them by claiming _‘it’s just a badge’_. Not this time. It’s not just a badge; it never will be, and they both know it. “They need to know they have a lawkeeper they can trust.”

Berlin thinks about pointing out the obvious: that they _can’t_ trust her, that this whole stupid situation is temporary or provisional or whatever worthless word they want to use, that one day her coward’s instincts will get the better of her and she’ll leave these trusting people for dead. Knowing that, she won’t let them look at her and imagine that she’s some reliable trustworthy lawkeeper. She won’t let them believe they can depend on her when she knows they can’t.

Just the thought of wearing that badge is enough to make her break out in a cold sweat, and the thought of what it means — that she’d be pinning Nolan’s title to her chest — makes her feel so sick that she has to stop and lean against the wall.

Amanda doesn’t say anything, but she presses a hand to her back, palm flat and fingers sure. Berlin breathes slowly, bracing herself on her bad hand and trying to spread her strapped fingers. It’s not just uncomfortable, thinking about things like that, it’s downright horrifying. A whole town full of people looking to her to protect it, and she’s the one sleeping with a gun under her pillow because she’s so damn scared.

“No,” she says.

Amanda sighs, drums her fingertips down her spine. “Berlin…”

“I said _no_.” Her voice is very thick. “These people… they don’t see me the way you do.”

She wants so badly to say _‘they see me the way I do’_ , but she doesn’t, and if Amanda notices the unspoken point she’s smart enough not to mention it. She just pats her lightly on the back and pulls away, sighs again like this is all so simple, like it’s just some mayoral campaign or something, a game of winning votes and swaying opinions.

“They’ll come around,” she says, like either of them really thinks that’s what it’s about. “But not if you don’t show them who you really are. You’re the filmmaker, Jess. You know how this stuff works. Go get yourself some fans.”

“I don’t want fans.” Berlin swallows, tastes acid. “I don’t want them to come around. I’m not their lawkeeper, Amanda. I’m not their friend or their saviour or their goddamn protector. I’m just a loose cannon with a gun, and I can’t… I’m not…” She presses her lips together, breathes through her nose. “I’m not good enough. Okay? I’m _not_. And I can’t promise these people that I’ll be able to protect them when they need me to. I can’t look them in the eye and tell them they’re not going die.”

And there it is. The truth of it, out there and inescapable, and all Amanda does is sigh. “No-one can. Not you, not me, not anyone.” She sighs again, like she doesn’t enjoy thinking about this any more than Berlin does. “Nobody’s asking for empty promises here, Jessica. We just want a lawkeeper who can show us they’re willing to do their best.”

Berlin shakes her head. “This town needs protection,” she says. “Real protection. The E-Rep’s gone. That makes us open season for raiders or VC or whoever the hell else decides to blow through here.” The thought turns her stomach again, and somewhere in the back of her mind an eight-year-old child screams. “These people are sitting targets. You can’t paper over that and pretend that everything’s okay just because some loose cannon with a gun is willing to put on a a badge. It doesn’t work that way.”

“Maybe not,” Amanda concedes. “But isn’t it enough that it might help them to feel safe?”

Once upon a time, it might have been. Years ago, logic like that might have cut through to some soft place inside of her, might have spoken to the little kid who so desperately wanted to believe in good people. Honestly, it’s a big part of the reason she fell in love with the E-Rep in the first place; first and foremost, she fell in love with the idea that someone out there was willing to defend the defenceless and protect the unprotected… that someone out there was willing to fight for people like _her_. Small, helpless, frightened people who had nowhere to go and no-one to turn to. It was good work, and important work.

Hard work, though, and so much harder when she’s doing it all on her own. She doesn’t have her E-Rep family standing by her side, not this time. She just has her own code of honour, an itchy trigger-finger, and some other sucker’s badge, and she doesn’t trust herself to do things right. She’s still fighting off visions of Tommy and Camp Reverie, memories of places that weren’t safe and people who paid with their lives for someone else’s terrible deeds.

How is she supposed to pledge herself to this town when that’s all she can think of? How is she supposed to protect and serve when the people she’s serving still call her ‘E-Rat’? They don’t trust her to protect them any more than she trusts herself to shoot straight when one of her hands is strapped and her head is a thousand goddamn miles away. They deserve better than her, and Berlin won’t insult them by wearing Joshua Nolan’s badge and claiming it’s for their own good.

“I don’t want them to feel safe,” she says. “I want them to _be_ safe. It’s dangerous feeling safe when you’re not.”

Amanda winces. She knows that’s true just as surely as Berlin does, and she doesn’t pretend it’s not. It’s oddly comforting, talking about this sort of thing with someone who has been through their own kind of hell, someone who doesn’t give her a funny look when she gets hazy and distant and remembers the things that made her cynical in the first place. It’s helpful, in a broken sort of way, looking in Amanda’s eyes and seeing the same shadows haunting them, knowing that she’s reliving the same sort of pain.

“All right,” she concedes after a moment. Berlin blinks her surprise — _really? that easy?_ — and Amanda laughs at the look on her face. “What? You’re right, I’m wrong. It happens, and I’m not ashamed to admit it when it does. We’ve got more important things to worry about than keeping up appearances.”

Berlin nods. Her good hand flexes over her gun. “Yeah.”

It’s not over, though. That much is painfully obvious. Amanda might have bought her argument for the time being, but there’s definitely more to all this than some symbolic chunk of metal. It’s probably something about sticking around, about accepting Defiance, not just as a place to live and work and exist but as a place to call home, a place to settle down and be comfortable and, yeah, maybe even one day feel safe. Probably. Amanda won’t give up on that kind of happy-ending shtako just because she’s letting the matter drop for now, and maybe Berlin is making a little more progress than she thought she was because she finds that the thought of coming back to it doesn’t twist in her gut quite as unpleasantly as she expected to.

At any rate, that’s a fight for a different day. For now, like Amanda said, they have more important things to do.

—

The people aren’t safe, and they definitely don’t feel it.

They’re afraid. Even the ones who hated the Earth Republic and its occupation can see the empty space they’ve left behind, the holes in security and the places that are suddenly exposed and ripe for the plundering. The E-Rep might have had their own agenda when they blew into Defiance, but not even the naysayers can deny any more that the town’s troubles run much deeper now that they’re not around. They don’t need to be objective to see the danger they’re in, and in another lifetime maybe Berlin would take some kind of vindictive pleasure in their mutterings and grumblings, in overhearing things like _‘never thought I’d miss the E-Rats…’_ and _‘at least they kept us out of trouble’_. In another lifetime, yeah, but now she’s one of these people, and she misses the E-Rats just as badly.

Berlin definitely isn’t the kind of lawkeeper that Defiance needs. Another version of herself from another universe, maybe, the one she lets herself imagine sometimes. A smart, funny, well-adjusted young woman, growing up nurtured and protected and warm, with choices and potential and food and clothes… she’d make this town proud, sure, but the world is colder now than it was the last time she imagined shtak like that, and she’s long since given up wondering what that idealised version of herself might look like now.

She’s only got what she is, what she did become: a soldier, trained in combat and violence from the moment she was old enough to hold a gun. She doesn’t have the luxury of compassion, of sympathy, of all those things that come as second nature to someone Amanda, growing up as she did with a sister to protect and take care of. Berlin doesn’t have her tact, the politician’s talent for reassuring frightened women and children or helping the homeless, for showing softness in moments when people need it then hardening to steel when someone pulls out a knife or cocks a gun. She’s not that flexible.

So, yeah, it’s no surprise that her definition of ‘lawkeeping’ isn’t the same as Amanda’s or Nolan’s. She deals with conflicts in the street by punching both sides in the face. She deals with bar brawls in the NeedWant by choking down the spectators’ drinks and _then_ punching both sides in the face. She deals with petty theft by shooting the perpetrators in the nearest appendage and hauling them to Doc Yewll’s by the second-nearest appendage. In short, she deals with a lot of relatively minor problems in a lot of inappropriate ways.

It won’t make her any friends. She knows that. Maybe there’s some messed-up part of her that does it for precisely that reason. She doesn’t want any friends, at least not here; she’s as scared of trust as these people are of dying in their beds, of raiders and VC assaults and whatever else might come rolling into town on the next land coach. She doesn’t want them to trust her or care about her; honestly, at this point she doesn’t even want them to respect her. Besides, she’s seen too many times what happens to a nowhere town like this when anarchy starts to spread, when petty arguments spill over into violence and bloodshed, when bar fights end in knife fights, when small-minded thieving turns to robbing homes with a loaded weapon and slaughtering families in front of their kids.

She’s been there before. If she thinks about it too much, her legs go out from under her and she ends up huddled in the corner of her bed, choking on her fists to silence the screams. It sends her right back there, thinking about it, so she doesn’t let herself do that. She thinks about Tommy instead, and the light-touch justice that he was so proud of. She reminds herself that getting soft and sweet was what got him killed. It hurts, yes, but it’s the truth and she won’t let any more people die for mistakes like that.

Amanda doesn’t approve, but for the time being she keeps her opinions limited to thinly-veiled ‘suggestions’ and ‘helpful advice’.

Doc Yewll, by contrast, does approves, at least as much as she approves of anything. She’s not exactly the smiling type, even at the best of times, but Berlin has learned to recognise the telltale signs, the almost-enthusiasm when she strides through the door with another down-and-out or wannabe criminal in need of stitches or an ice-pack. Possibly she sees something of a kindred spirit in Berlin, a woman who doesn’t care how brutal things get when dealing with assholes who deserve worse. Possibly she’s just happy to have something to do and an audience to do it in front of; people to fix and witty one-liners to deliver, what more could an Indogene ask for?

“Gotta say,” she says, the third or fourth time Berlin shows up with a low-life slung over her shoulder, “for someone who insists she’s not here for the repartee, you keep coming back.”

Berlin grunts, and tosses the derelict onto the nearest bed without ceremony. “What can I say? I like the view.”

“Down, kitten. We’re not that kind of establishment.” She doesn’t look at her, of course, but her tone speaks volumes, as close to smirking as she ever gets. “How’s the hand coming along?”

“Good enough,” Berlin says. She shakes it out to prove the point, and tries not to wince. “When do I get to take this shtak off?”

“When you ask nicely,” Yewll quips. “And when you stop using it to fill my lab with petty thieves instead of letting it mend like I told you to. Do the words _‘give it time’_ mean something different in Bull-Headed E-Rep Soldier?”

“Ex-E-Rep Soldier,” Berlin snaps. “And yeah, it does. It means _‘keep the town safe at all costs’_. It means _‘I never needed it taped in the first place, but some people think I need coddling’_. It means—”

“It means _‘be nice to your doctor, or your fingers won’t be the only thing getting strapped’_.”

“Thought you weren’t that kind of establishment.”

Yewll’s expression doesn’t change, but Berlin’s sure she catches the faintest twitch at the corner of her mouth. “We make exceptions for pretty faces. And stupid ones. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which category yours falls into.”

Berlin snorts, and kicks at the low-life’s bed. He groans his annoyance, and claps a hand over the still-bleeding wound in his arm. “All right,” she says. “Enough small-talk. Need this idiot patched up some time within the next decade.” She gives the bed another vicious kick. “Not that he’d deserve it.”

Yewll rolls her eyes. “And people say I have lousy bedside manner,” she mutters. “Dare I ask what this one was doing? Looking at you funny?”

“Close enough.” Technically, he was looking at someone else, but it’s a messy and stupid story involving unpaid gambling debts and stolen flowers, and she has no intention of going into it right now. The challenge to her authority grates on her nerves, and there’s no good-natured banter in the way she pushes back. “Don’t you have better things to do than take cheap shots at the one person still trying to keep things together around here? Like… oh, I don’t know, practicing medicine?”

“Well, well. Looks like the kitten does have teeth. Know how to use them, slugger?”

“Keep pushing, and you’ll find out.”

Yewll sobers. Not much, not completely, but it’s noticable just the same, and when she counters it’s without her typical wryness. “Seriously. What’s got your panties in a bunch this morning? Run out of drunk-and-disorderlies to beat to a pulp? Going through the mindless-violence DTs?”

Berlin catches the note of concern carefully hidden under the jibe, and she knows exactly where it’s come from; Yewll would never waste her breath on that kind of shtak, not off her own back. “You’ve been talking to Amanda.”

“Actually, she’s been talking to me. Wanted to know your body count for the week.” She’s locked in on her patient, but the sarcasm is heavy in her voice. “Also wanted my phone number.”

“Sure she did.”

Yewll rolls her eyes. “Congratulations, you called my bluff. Please collect your winnings on your way out.” She shakes her head, reaches for a bottle of something that looks like it’s going to sting; Berlin doesn’t envy the bastard on the table. “And for the love of whatever god you may or may not worship, please consider therapy. Or a hobby. Taxidermy, for example. Fun for the whole family.” The low-life screams when she douses his wound, but Yewll ignores him. “Hell, you can try breathing exercises for all I care, just do something. My waning supply of iodine will be oh so grateful.”

Annoyed, Berlin crosses back to the door. “I didn’t ask for this, you know.”

“Oh, boo-hoo, cry me a river.” The playfulness is long gone now, from both of them. “We’ve all got troubles. You don’t see the rest of us solving them with bullets instead of brains.”

“That’s because the rest of you are lousy shots,” Berlin counters hotly. “If you weren’t, maybe you wouldn’t need to pin all your hopes on some ‘bull-headed E-Rep soldier’ who never wanted to be in this shtakhole in the first place.”

“Big talk from such a pretty little mouth. Got the _cajones_ to back it up?” She’s not offended, Berlin can tell; she’s even softening a bit, at least as much as she ever does, which says a whole lot more than her words. “Let me level with you here, slick: I’m not the one with the problem. Matter of fact, I enjoy the company. And what can I say? I have a weakness for holsters.”

Despite herself, Berlin laughs. “I knew there was a reason I liked you.”

“Uh huh. Keep it in your pants.” She sobers again, but doesn’t sharpen. “The bottom line is, this shoot-first-ask-questions-never attitude of yours is bad for business. Hell, it’s bad for everyone. We’re already running low on supplies, and from what I hear that’s not going to change any time soon. Without the gulanite coming in from the McCawley mines, it’s only a matter of time before this town starts drowning, and your itchy trigger-finger is a drain on resources we can’t afford.”

That stops Berlin in her tracks. “Amanda never said anything about that…”

“Well, jeez, I wonder why. Wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that you’ve already got one foot out the door, would it?”

“I…” But the protestations die gurgling in her throat, as impotent as the rest of her. “Shut up.”

Yewll rolls her eyes. “Your way with words is a gift to us all,” she deadpans. “Now, are we done wallowing in self-pity for the day? Can I attend to my patient in peace, or would you like to play another rousing game of Woe Is Me, I’m The Only One With Problems?”

Berlin thinks about telling her to shut up again. It’s tempting, if only to vent a little of her frustration, but of course it wouldn’t achieve anything. Yewll might be telling the truth, or she might be twisting it to prove some bitchy little point; either way, pushing her won’t do either of them any good. A little bitter banter is one thing, but those are serious accusations and for all her personal issues Berlin doesn’t want to be responsible for hurting this town or its people. She’s already unreliable; she doesn’t want to be flat-out harmful as well, and if there’s even a grain of truth in what Yewll’s telling her…

She sighs, ducks her head to let the good doctor know that she’s won. “Fine,” she says. “You’ve made your point. You win, I lose, go put another notch in your bedpost if that’s what you want. Just, while you’re at it, maybe stop that guy from bleeding to death and putting another notch in mine?” Neither of them smile, but Berlin has the decency to look suitably chastened. “And, uh, maybe don’t mention any of this to Amanda?”

“You know, I’m running out of room for all your dirty little secrets. Have you considered a safety deposit box?”

Berlin grits her teeth. “Come on, Doc. Please.”

“Oh, all right.” She rolls her eyes again. “But only because you’re so gosh-darn cute when you pout.”

_Cute_ isn’t exactly what Berlin was aiming for… but given the circumstances she’ll accept it.

—

Amanda is hiding in her office.

She’s hunched over some important-looking paperwork or another, and she doesn’t look up when Berlin approaches. She definitely knows she’s there, though, because her pen skips a letter or two on the page, and the perfect precision of her handwriting isn’t quite so neat when she picks it up again. Berlin clears her throat, announcing herself as best she can without words, and bites down on the instinct to say _‘sir’_.

Amanda still doesn’t lift her head. “Trouble at the NeedWant?”

Berlin shakes her head, then remembers that Amanda isn’t looking at her. “Not this time.”

“You sound nervous.” Finally she does look up, eyes narrowed and dark. “What’s wrong?”

Berlin hesitates for a moment, floundering for words. It’s becoming something of a problem, finding herself in the middle of conversations before she’s even figured out the beginning, but it’s better than letting things fester until they eat her alive. She leans forward, braces her hands on Amanda’s desk, and tries to ignore her coward’s instincts, the urge to turn around and run away.

“Been talking to Yewll,” she blurts out at last.

Amanda quirks a brow. “You hurt?”

“No.” She flexes her strapped fingers. There’s almost no pain at all now; it’s possible she’s so used to it by now that she just doesn’t notice it any more, or else Yewll was simply being stubborn when she refused to give her the all-clear. “I had a… there was… you know what, never mind. It’s not important.”

Evasive, maybe, but if Amanda notices the way she blushes she’s kind enough not to question it. “Fair enough,” she says instead, and lets Berlin imagine she actually believes her.

“Yeah.” She clears her throat, forces herself to focus. “Point is, Doc says we’re in trouble. The town, I mean. Not…” She flounders, flushes deeper. “… _‘us’_.”

Amanda doesn’t smile. “We are,” she says, so matter-of-fact that Berlin wonders for a second if she’s gone mad. “We’ve been in trouble since the Earth Republic left. You know that.”

“I know that,” Berlin agrees grudgingly. “I know that we’re unprotected and undefended. I know that people are scared of what might come riding in with the next shipment of… whatever the hell people ship here. I know that they’re right to be scared, and I know that we’re screwed if the Votanis Collective sets its sights on us. I know all that, yeah. But that’s not what Yewll was talking.”

“Oh?” The tone of her voice — resignation, exhaustion, and just a hint of frustration — makes it very clearly that she knows exactly where this is heading. “And what was she talking about?”

Berlin looks away, wills her own voice to stay steady. “She was talking about resources, about gulanite and the mines. She said we’re _drowning_ , Amanda, and that’s…” Her hands give an involuntary twitch, so she takes them back and hides them behind her back. “That’s not about protection, Amanda. That’s not about a town in need of a lawkeeper, or me putting on a badge and letting people pretend they’re safe. Resources, gulanite, _drowning_ … that’s not something I can help with, is it? I can’t get us resources that don’t exist, and neither can you, and that’s not…”

She doesn’t finish, but she doesn’t have to. Amanda hears it, and she sighs. “That’s not what you signed on for.”

Berlin closes her eyes. She thinks about cushy office jobs in Texas and Iowa, about safe places a thousand miles away, and dangerous places much closer. She thinks about running away like the coward she is, like the soldier she still wants to be. She thinks about packing a bag and disappearing in the dead of night, and the idea is so damn tempting. _So damn tempting_ , yes, but then she remembers her room at the NeedWant, with its silken sheets and its heavy perfume, with its feather pillows and the gun she keeps under them.

“That’s right.” She might not be willing to do anything about it, but she won’t deny it either. Her voice is sharp, more so than she meant it to be, but of course she’s never been able to soften on command like Amanda can. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me about this?”

Amanda doesn’t answer for a very long time. She studies her for a beat or two, then goes right back to dotting ‘I’s and crossing ‘T’s on her stupid paperwork, like the conversation isn’t worthy of her time any more. Berlin thinks about throwing all that paper off the desk, getting right up into Amanda’s face and staring her down until she drags an answer out of her by brute force or force of will; it makes for a pleasant fantasy, but she holds herself back. She keeps one hand on her holster, fingers flexing over the grip of her gun, and uses the solidity to keep her breathing even, keep herself from doing anything stupid.

Finally, after what feels like forever, Amanda looks back up at her. The shadows under her eyes are very deep, the smudged bruise-marks of too many sleepless nights and not enough support outside of this place; Berlin feels a small part of her melt a little, a flood of guilt surging in to take the edge off the righteous indignation. It makes her soften, makes her more like something Amanda would be, and when she asks the question again — “ _Why didn’t you tell me_?” — it’s no longer an accusation.

Softer or not, Amanda still doesn’t answer. She just watches her for a long hard beat, then finally counters with “How are you feeling today?”

Berlin frowns, torn between confusion and annoyance. “I’m fine,” she mutters. “Answer the question.”

She doesn’t, of course. “Jessica.”

“It’s Berlin.”

Amanda’s expression shifts just slightly, a frown and then the ghost of a smile. “ _Jessica_.” It’s deliberate, goading, like she wants her to lose her temper, like that would somehow prove something. “How about you answer mine?”

“I said I’m fine.” The lie tastes sour, like a really bad hangover. “Stopped a street-fight. Only minor injuries.” She sees Yewll flash before her mind’s eye, and the low-life with a hole in his arm. “…sort of.”

“Mhm. ‘Sort of’.” Amanda quirks a brow, but doesn’t press the lie; she has other things to focus on, other ways to make Berlin feel worthless. “I didn’t ask what you’ve done. I asked how you’re feeling.”

Berlin thinks about her particular brand of lawkeeping, about putting bullets in people before she’ll bother trying to talk to them. She thinks about how easy it comes to her, that shoot-first attitude Yewll mentioned, thinks about the way her hands get steady on a gun’s grip, the way holding it at night helps to keep the bad dreams away. She thinks about Defiance, about a town that desperately needs a level-headed lawkeeper to protect it. She thinks about Amanda begging her to wear a badge, about the way she refuses, the way it makes her pulse hammer just to think about it, the way little things like that still make her panic. She thinks about Tommy and his definition of ‘right’, all the reasons she has for hardening herself, turning her spine to steel and eking out hard justice. She thinks about staring down a firing squad at Camp Reverie, about standing in a pool of her mother’s blood at eight years old. She thinks about all the people she’s watched die and all the ways she still doesn’t understand why she isn’t one of them.

She wonders if she’ll ever be able to hear that question, _‘how are you feeling,’_ without instantly thinking about all of those things.

“You think I’m a flight risk.” That doesn’t answer Amanda’s question, but it sure as hell answers her own. “You think I’m going to run away at the first sign of trouble. That’s why you didn’t tell me.”

_You think I’m a coward_ , she doesn’t say. _Hell, you’re probably right._

“No.” Amanda’s voice is very hard now. “I don’t think that for a second. Not for one single second, do you hear me?”

Berlin swallows thickly. Amanda is looking at her like it’s so important, like she has to believe that even if she doesn’t believe anything else she ever says, like both of their pathetic little lives depend on it. Her eyes are heated and very bright, reflecting the lights from the ceiling, and Berlin wants to drown in them, wants to dive in and never come out again. She wants to believe her too, wants it to mean as much to her as it does to Amanda, but it’s so damn hard to believe in someone else’s faith, so damn hard to believe that anyone could look at her and not see the awful things she sees in herself.

“Then what?” she manages. “If you didn’t think I was going to run away, why keep it from me?”

She doesn’t add _‘why carry that weight alone?’_ But she wants to.

“I don’t think you’re a flight risk,” Amanda says again. “But I do think you’re struggling. I think you’ve been through a hell of a lot, and I don’t think you’ve recovered. I think you still have bad days. I mean… I mean, _really_ bad days. Days when you…” She sighs, shakes her head. “Days when you just can’t take any more bad news.”

Berlin feels like she’s been kicked in the knees. “Oh.”

“Yeah.” Amanda sighs again, fingers twitching over her paperwork, like she wants to reach for Berlin’s hand. “And that… don’t get me wrong, that’s completely understandable. God knows, I’d feel exactly the same way if I’d been through what you have. But it’s not… ” She grimaces. “I just didn’t want to make it any harder for you, that’s all. I didn’t want to make those bad days worse, and I didn’t want to give you any reason to second-guess how far you’ve come. You’ve worked so damn hard to get to where you are, and I didn’t want…” She breaks off, swears softly, then tries again. “I was trying to protect you.”

The kicked-in-the-knees feeling shifts upwards, turns into a gut-punch, like all the air has been sucked out of the room. Berlin can’t breathe, can’t think, and it takes every ounce of strength she has to stay standing, to keep from falling to the floor. The room is blurring and swerving, like the _fade-in, fade-out_ money-shot of a boxer’s vision in the instant before he blacks out, and the only reason she doesn’t let herself collapse is because she knows it would prove Amanda’s point.

She’s not weak. She’s not a helpless little flower-child that needs protecting. She’s been through too damn much to ever be that person again, and she will not let Amanda think otherwise.

“I’m not…” Her voice sounds very, very small, and she hates that. “No.”

“I’m sorry.” She doesn’t sound sorry, though, not even a little bit. “Look, I know you don’t want to be dependant on anyone. I know it scares you half to death, thinking of Defiance as your home, thinking of us as your people. I know you think you need to do everything all by yourself, that you need to be an island and that this town needs to be some hellhole that you hate… but I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t matter what you want or what you don’t. Whether you like it or not, I’m here for you. Whether you want me to or not, I’m going to protect you from shit like this. Because—”

“Don’t.” It comes out like a scream. “Don’t say it, Amanda. Don’t.”

She does. Of course she does. “Because I’m your _friend_ , Jess. Because I _care_ about you.”

Berlin is fairly sure she’s going to be sick. “I said _‘don’t’_.”

But of course Amanda keeps right on going, plowing through Berlin’s protestations like they’re made of paper, like _she’s_ made of paper. “No,” she says. “No, you listen to me. I know it’s hard. I know it hurts. Believe me, I know all that. I know how many people you’ve lost, and I know how many times you’ve learned that caring about people is a one-way ticket to watching them die. But you can’t stop it. Okay? You can’t stop other people wanting to protect you or take care of you or keep you safe. You can’t stop them caring about you. And in the end, no matter how hard you try, you can’t to stop yourself from caring about them either.”

_Yes, I can_ , Berlin thinks, but even in her head it sounds hopeless and desperate. _I can, and I will. I’m not going to stick around here just to watch this town go up in smoke. I’m not going to be the last one standing again. I’m not going to bury your goddamn corpse next to his!_

“No,” she says aloud. Her voice is thick, mouth full of acid and pain, but she gets the word out by sheer force of will. “You don’t… you don’t get to pin me down and tell me I’m your friend, then hide the important stuff some place you think I can’t reach. You don’t get to turn me into a better person, turn me into something new and strong, and then decide on my behalf when I need protecting. You give me a room, give me a job, give me everything you think that I need, and you think that gives you the right to decide what I can and can’t take? No.” She turns away, shaking. “No, you don’t get to do that.”

Amanda pushes back the chair, rises slowly to her feet. “I’m the mayor,” she says. “I can do what I want.”

It’s a joke, sort of, but Berlin can’t laugh. Her mouth is frozen open in a kind of silent scream and her throat is so tight she can’t breathe.

“I should be dead,” she whispers. “A hundred times over, I should be dead. And you don’t…” She turns back, tries to face her; her vision is a blur of tears, but she knows she’s there and that’s enough. “You don’t get to make me feel like it’s all right if I’m not.”

Amanda catches her by the wrist, holds her until the tremors subside. “Someone has to.”

“Not you,” Berlin whispers. “Not _you_.”

“Yes. _Me_.” She pulls her in, holds her close. “You can’t undo injustices that way, Jessica. You can’t cut out your heart while it’s still beating, or kick-start someone else’s by saying _‘it should have been me.’_ Life doesn’t work that way. And if I’m the one who can help you make some kind of peace with that, if I can help you to find a place in the world where you feel like you belong… if I can get you to a point where you can wake in the morning, even just once, without wishing you were dead…” Her voice cracks a little on _‘dead,’_ but it doesn’t break completely. “If I can help you to come to terms with some tiny part of what you’re going through, then damn right I will.”

“But I don’t want you to,” Berlin says. She means it as a kind of defiance, but it comes out choked like a plea. “I don’t want to ‘come to terms’ with it. I don’t want to feel like I belong here, or anywhere else. I don’t want… I don’t _deserve_ to feel that way.”

There it is again, that word. _Deserve_ , and Amanda latches on to it like a golden retriever pouncing on a tennis ball. “No.” Her voice is solid and incredibly strong. “If there’s anything you ‘don’t deserve’ it’s the hell you’re putting yourself through.”

It might be true. It might not be. Honestly, it doesn’t matter if it is or isn’t, because even if it is, even if Berlin really is being too cruel to herself, she can’t be any other way. At least not yet, and even with Amanda’s help. She can’t look in the mirror and see someone worthy, someone the people of Defiance can depend on, someone who might make a good lawkeeper or a good friend or a good person. No matter how hard she looks at herself, no matter how long or how desperately she searches, she can’t find someone who deserves to be alive when people like Tommy aren’t, when people like her mother are killed for protecting their children, when people in Camp Reverie are shot down like vermin because they’re scared and desperate. Those people deserved to survive, and no matter what Berlin does, no matter what Amanda does, no matter what anyone does, she won’t ever understand why she’s the one who did.

“You say that like it’s so easy,” she says. “Just suck it up, deal with it, move on? Just close my eyes and pretend it’s fair? Pretend it’s okay?”

“I didn’t say that,” Amanda says softly. She comes up behind her, wraps her arms around Berlin’s waist; she holds her close, like a friend, maybe like something more than a friend, like family and home and all those things Berlin won’t allow herself to think about. “You can’t change the way things are. But you can change the way you look at them.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Maybe not. But eventually you’re going to have to.” She sighs; her breath is warm, intimate across the side of Berlin’s face. “No-one’s asking you to just put all this behind you, or act like it never happened. No-one’s asking you to pretend it’s fair or right. No-one’s expecting you to stop wondering why you’re the one who survived, and no-one’s expecting to suddenly stop missing the people you’ve lost. That’s never going to happen. We know that. But you have to stop wishing yourself into an early grave. You _have to_ , Jess, okay? If not for yourself, then for the rest of us.”

Berlin swallows very hard, turns around to find Amanda’s face, and catches the edge of her jaw with her mouth. “You.”

“Yes. Whether you want us or not, there are people in this town who care about you. We’re here, and we’re not going anywhere. Don’t you think you owe us the same?”

It’s a cheap trick, turning it around like that, but it makes Berlin stop, makes her look beyond her own reflection, beyond the guilt and the grief and all those other strangling feelings. It makes her think of people like Amanda, holding a whole town together with glue and good intentions, doing what’s best for the people who depend on her, not because she can’t bear to fail but because she cares too much to let them down.

Amanda cares so much, not just about lost causes like Berlin, but about everyone in this town… hell, maybe about the stupid town itself. She cares so much and so deeply, and in so many impossible ways. Amanda is everything Berlin doesn’t trust herself to be, everything that terrifies her, openness and honesty, compassion and kindness and faith. She’s everything Tommy was, all the things that got him killed, but she has so many things that he never had too; she’s strong and brave, and she knows how to let people in, in a way he never did. Amanda has so much power in her, so much passion; it makes Berlin’s pulse quicken in the moments when she lets herself fall for it.

It’s the same thing that convinced her to stay for as long as she has, that kept her here in a town she hates protecting these people who still hate her. Amanda is so many things that don’t make sense to someone like Berlin, so many things that shouldn’t survive and thrive the way they do. Berlin would have died long ago if she’d been more like Amanda, and seeing her like this now, older than her and so much more alive, almost makes her want to keep breathing just to take it all in.

“I don’t know,” she says aloud. It’s the answer to a lot of questions, most of which were never asked.

Amanda sighs, breath still warm against her skin, tickling and welcoming and breathtaking. They’re unbearably close to each other, and Berlin knows that she should pull away, knows that she needs to put some space between them, between herself and the confusion, between the part of her that is still so scared of being here and the part that doesn’t want Amanda to ever let her go. It’s too much, and if she stays here a moment longer, the town won’t be the only thing drowning.

“I know you don’t,” Amanda says. “And that’s okay.” The intimacy is painful; she leans in closer, brushes her forehead against Berlin’s cheek, the all-but-healed cut under her eye, the faded bruises left over from Reverie, all the little marks and signs that tell her those feelings should be over. “Stick around long enough, maybe you’ll figure it out.”

_Maybe_. It’s such a stupid word, so abstract and indistinct, but believing in it comes easier than Berlin expected it to. She’s still not really convinced, but it’s easier than she thought it would be to pretend that she is, to pretend that all of this really is helping, that it’s getting her closer to where Amanda thinks she needs to be. She’s not, might never be, but if she can make a good show of it for Amanda’s sake, maybe that’s enough for now.

She turns around completely, twisting in Amanda’s arms until they’re touching everywhere, until she can get a good look into her eyes, find the faith she’s never found inside herself. “Might as well,” she says softly. “Looks like you need all the help you can get.”

Amanda smiles, and when she speaks her voice is unimaginably strong. “Looks that way.”

They’re very close, faces touching in intimate places, and there’s something very deliberate in the way she leans in to make it even more so. It leaves Berlin breathless all over again, but in a way that, for once, has nothing to do with not wanting to breathe, nothing to do with struggling or hurting or that awful feeling that clamps down over her lungs when she remembers the things that brought her here. It leaves her breathless in a way that makes her want to stand tall, want to try, want to get up and become more, become closer, become the thing she sees reflected in Amanda’s eyes. It makes her _want_ , in a way she thought she’d lost for good.

She closes her eyes, swallows down the smell of whiskey and perfume, lingering echoes of the NeedWant and the clean leather and wood polish of the mayor’s office. _I want to be good enough for you,_ she thinks. _Not this town, not its people. You._

“You don’t have to protect me,” she says aloud. She thinks of the badge she won’t wear, the title she won’t accept, thinks of all the things she’s too afraid to step up and become. _Lawkeeper_ , in duty as well as name. “It’s my job to protect you.”

Amanda smiles against her skin, turns to press her lips to the corner of Berlin’s mouth. “Or maybe we should protect each other.”

Berlin smiles too. It’s fluttering and fragile, a splash of salt against Amanda’s jaw, but it’s there and it’s real and it’s hers.

“Maybe we should,” she says.

—


	6. Chapter 6

—

It’s not as easy as it sounds.

Protecting each other, protecting the town, protecting anyone at all. It’s messy and complicated, and with tensions rising as hard and fast as they are it’s only going to get worse.

Panic is a funny thing. Once it digs its claws in, it’s extremely difficult to pull them back out, and in a town like Defiance the feeling spreads like an epidemic. Amanda doesn’t need to make an announcement to tell people that the town’s in trouble; they know it before she even gets a word out. It’s like a thunderstorm brewing, the shift in the air and the twist in atmosphere, like static and weight and pressure and the undeniable certainty that before too long it’s going to burst. They don’t need a big fancy speech from the mayor to know that their situation is bleak; a glance at their empty dinner plate tells them all they need to know.

Still, for what little it’s worth, Amanda does the best she can. She organises a few excursions out to the mines, makes a noble feint at getting things up and running again; it proves futile, though, and she comes back disillusioned and depressed. Whatever the hell Irisa and her spaceship did out there, it’s left the mines well and truly cut off, and the gulanite along with it.

Though she desperately wants to, Berlin doesn’t join them out there; she’s been down in the mines before, and a part of her is itching to see what’s left of them, to see the graveyard Irisa left in her wake, but she has more important things to deal with than her own vindictive curiosity. Someone has to keep an eye on the town, after all, and besides she hears all of the messy details when Amanda and the others come home. It’s bad, really bad, and every word out of their mouths is another long, long night in the lawkeeper’s office.

Once word gets out, once it becomes public knowledge, she finds her hands — and cells — getting very full very fast. Harmless street fights turn into violent free-for-alls, petty theft devolves into breaking-and-entering, and empty threats become armed and dangerous and very, very bloody; desperation twists even the softest hearts into something sharp and serrated, and there’s no shortage of desperation in Defiance now. Without work, formerly good people are driven to terrible things, and again and again Berlin finds herself locking up people she’s shared drinks with, people she knows for a fact are better than the things they’re forced to do.

It’s no surprise at all, how quickly things go from bad to worse… and how quickly they go from worse to fatal.

—

They’re in Amanda’s office when it happens.

In hindsight, that’s probably for the best; what it lacks in cover and protection it makes up for in seclusion. Had they been outside on the streets or in the NeedWant, somewhere with a lot of bystanders or a lot of open space (or, worst, both) it could have been a whole lot more dangerous and a hell of a lot more deadly. As it goes it’s just the two of them, and that makes things simple, if not easy.

They’re sat on opposite sides of Amanda’s big mayor’s desk, working through what’s probably their second or third glass of whiskey and half-heartedly pretending to eat some mostly-cold pasta dish. The liquor, if not the pasta, is technically off the record — they’re both supposed to be on duty, Amanda with her big-name paperwork and Berlin out on the streets patrolling for signs of trouble — but they don’t often find the time for lunch together these days. It’s become something of a habit, sharing a drink when they share a meal; honestly, it’s probably a bad idea, and rather more so for a lawkeeper than for the mayor, but Berlin has never been able to resist a good booze buzz and Amanda is nothing if not a terrible influence.

(Looking back now, she probably should have figured that part out seventeen hangovers ago.)

Amanda’s in a good mood, Berlin not so much. She’s been up half the night with the latest in a string of not-so-minor offenders, in this case a loud-mouthed Irathient brat who pulled a knife on a sugar-bread vendor. He spent the night cooling off in a cell, and Berlin spent the night listening to the growling in his stomach. It makes her sadder than she’d ever admit, all this punishing of angry disillusioned people; the Irath kid might have been a punk with a bad attitude, but he was also hungry and desperate, and while Berlin would have gladly spent an evening or two kicking him in the teeth if she thought he deserved it she’s been starving like that too and it left a bitter taste in her mouth to watch him choking on spit in his sleep.

She can still taste that bitterness now, sitting pretty up in Amanda’s big fancy mayor’s office, washing down pasta with top-shelf whiskey. True, the pasta’s no good — it’s probably at least a year past its expiration date — but that’s really not the point, at least not at the moment. The point is, it’s a hell of a lot more than the ex-miners have, and a hell of a lot more than their families have too. It’s not fair, and it’s not right.

The question spills out of her before she can stop it, a sullen-sounding mumble that turns her cheeks red. “Doesn’t it make you sick?”

Amanda chuckles, doesn’t skip a beat. “That’s what the pasta’s for.”

“Not that.” The booze is too good for that, honestly, and in any case Berlin’s tolerance has increased a hundredfold since she started taking lunch with Amanda. (Funny how that works.) “I’m talking about this.”

“Could you be more specific?” Amanda asks, though Berlin can tell she knows.

“This,” she snaps, annoyed. “All of it. Everything. You and me, up here with your fancy chairs and fancy tables, with your fancy mayor’s wallpaper, with food and booze and… and carpets.”

“Carpets,” Amanda echoes, with a wry sort of smile.

“You know what I mean. All this stuff, and the shtak it’s supposed to represent. The two of us eating and drinking and all the rest of it while there are people out on the streets starving and shooting each other and breaking into houses for scraps.”

Amanda sighs. She gives up on the feint at good humour, and pushes her plate away; the food’s barely touched, no more than Berlin’s, and of course that just makes her feel worse. It makes them both feel worse, apparently, because she can feel it radiating off Amanda now as well, the shame and the impotent rage, the certainty that she’s right, that it isn’t fair. But what can she do about it? What can either of them do when the problem is so much bigger than they are?

Still, she says the words, admits it aloud because that, at least, is right.

“Yeah,” she says. Like confession ever really cleansed anything. “Yeah, it makes me sick.”

They both give up on the food, but not the drink, and of course that doesn’t help either. It’s wasteful as well as unworthy, and it makes Berlin’s stomach churn in a way that it hasn’t in a long while, guilt and self-loathing and the slowly-rising echoes of dead ghosts. She swallow very hard, breathes deep and slow to try and control the feeling, or at least to try and silence the voices, and hopes against hope that Amanda won’t look close enough to see.

She does, of course. Just like she always does. “Jess…”

Berlin shuts her eyes, braces for the wave of sympathy, the cloying compassion and the offer of friendship. “Don’t start.”

“I wasn’t going to.” There’s a smile in her voice, though, like she knows she’s been caught, like this is really Plan B. “I was just going to say _‘drink up’_.”

Plan B or not, it’s a fair point. They are supposed to be on duty, after all, and the town isn’t getting any safer with them sitting here like this. Berlin cracks her eyes open again, mostly just to roll them at Amanda, then drains the dregs of her glass in a loud inelegant gulp. It tastes sourer than it did, almost rancid in her mouth, and it takes a great deal of effort not to choke on it.

That’s when the door slams open, exploding outwards with a _crack_ that shakes the windows.

Berlin’s on her feet before the sound has even finished reverberating, hand on her holster and whirling on her heels to find the source. It might be a false alarm, a misunderstanding or an accidental slip, but given the mood of the town lately that’s not a chance she’s going to take.

A smart move, as it turns out; she catches the gleam of gunmetal off the lights, hears the _click_ of it loading, and she has just enough time to yell at Amanda to get _down_ before the room explodes in a shower of gunfire.

They both hit the ground, Berlin dropping into a soldier’s crouch and Amanda ducking down behind the desk. It’s a sensible move, good reflexes, and Berlin is deeply relieved. One less potential casualty to worry about, and given the state of her head lately that’s really important.

With Amanda at least mostly out of harm’s way, it’s a whole lot easier to turn off her brain and lock in on the threat itself, the hooded figure standing in the doorway pointing a chupping SMG at her head. He’s covered from head to toe, and all she can make out for sure is that he’s male, stocky, and not especially tall. His clothing is worn but heavy, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that he’s probably a miner, out of work and driven to madness by hunger and desperation.

He’s not talking; that says he had no plan of attack. Under normal circumstances, that might be good, give Berlin a little wiggle room to play with, but it’s a very different story in a place like this; he’s starving and scared, probably already feels like his back’s against the wall. No-one tears into the mayor’s office and starts shooting if they expect to make it out; Berlin knows from her own experience that the desperation will make the choice for him in the end, even if he was once a reasonable man. A hundred fully-loaded SMGs aren’t half as dangerous as someone with no way out.

Still, she takes a deep breath. “Hey!”

The gun jumps in his hand, a panicked little twitch. “Shut up!”

Definitely a miner; she’d recognise that dirt-breather’s husk anywhere. Definitely not a pro, either; poor bastard’s probably never held a gun in his life. It’s obvious, and he’s giving himself away in everything he does, the way his fingers twitch on the trigger even when he’s not shooting, the way he started blasting without taking aim first, the way he’s yelling at her to shut up but not threatening to blow her head off if she doesn’t. It’s not that he’s after shock value or warning shots, not like he was aiming to miss so that he could negotiate or scare the hell out of them so that they’d listen. He just doesn’t have a damn clue what he’s doing.

 _Desperation_ , she thinks again, and wishes her heart wouldn’t soften the way it does. 

She squints through the haze, tries to find his face. He’s got it covered, scarves and hoods and whatever else, but the tilt of his neck makes it clear that that he’s not looking at her. She might be the one with the gun, but his attention is locked fast on Amanda, and of course that tells her everything she needs to know. Ransom, maybe, or else a badly-planned execution. Either way, it’s bad news.

Bad, yes, but it’s also a valuable distraction, and Berlin uses it. She’s already got a hand on her gun, and she’s well practiced at doing things like this unnoticed; she eases it out of her holster, slow and steady and oh so careful—

“Hey!” He’s still not looking at her, but he knows what she’s doing. “Drop it!”

She doesn’t. It’s probably stupid and definitely dangerous, but it’s the only shot she has, and the only sure-fire way of getting his attention away from Amanda. That, she can deal with; she’d stared down gun barrels a thousand times before Reverie twisted it into something darker, and she’s been in situations just like this enough times to keep a cool head when the shtak goes down… just as long as it’s coming down on _her_. The second he turns back to Amanda, the second he starts angling that damn gun of his to take aim at the desk, she’s screwed.

“Easy…” That’s Amanda, picking the worst possible moment to peek out from behind her desk. Berlin wants to scream at her to shut up and let her handle this, wants to throw herself into the space between them, do whatever the hell it takes to keep her safe. “Just take it easy. We can talk this through. We’re all on the same side.”

 _No we’re not,_ Berlin thinks, but she takes advantage of Amanda’s talking to inch forward a little, get her finger over the hammer of her handgun and get sights on his weapon arm. Just a little closer, a little higher, and as desperately as she wants to put herself between Amanda and the bullets the soldier in her knows that the best thing either of them can do right now is keep the bastard talking.

He’s yelling at Amanda, pouring out all of that impotent rage, all of that desperation and frustration, waving the gun around like he’s forgotten it’s loaded. Berlin can’t allow herself the luxury of listening to what he’s saying, to what either of them are; she can’t afford to hear the words and let them strike her in the chest. She can’t afford to lose her focus, so she drowns it all out and reminds herself that he’s after Amanda, that his stupid SMG is loaded, and that he won’t think twice before taking aim again if she pushes the wrong buttons.

It doesn’t matter that there’s a man behind those scarves and hoods. It doesn’t matter that he’s starving, that he probably has a family who’s starving too. None of that matters at all, because he’s armed and dangerous, _armed and dangerous_ and one wrong move away from taking aim at Amanda. Berlin has to deal with that, has to defuse that bomb before it goes off and leaves her with another corpse she once cared about.

 _No,_ she thinks, and suddenly their attacker isn’t the only one who’s desperate. _Not this time. Not again. Not her, not her, not her!_

She fires.

He does too, whirling with his stupid little SMG and firing off a haze of bullets that crack through the air. Berlin yells at Amanda to get down, surges forward to make sure the focus stays on her, and the bullets too. He’s shooting blind, a hundred bullets in a hundred different directions, but she’s a trained soldier; she’s been taking shots like this for half her damn life, and she doesn’t even need three.

She takes two, dead-eye accurate and straight through his shoulder. She’s going for pain, the kind that will force him to drop his gun, and that’s exactly what she gets. The rain of gunfire cuts off with a roar, and the silence that follows is deafening.

It’s over in about half a second, but that’s not good enough. Not even close, and Berlin has no intention of stopping just because the threat is neutralised for a moment or two. She runs at him, charges and tackles him to the ground, holds him down with every ounce of strength she has. She can hear the bastard screaming, can hear Amanda calling her name, but she doesn’t listen to either of them. It’s not over until it’s _over_ , and she won’t let herself breathe again until she knows it is.

She’s much rougher than she needs to be; he’s bleeding heavily, and she’s not above making it heavier. She presses her knee to the small of his back, drives down hard until his scream turns to a sob, and shoves her gun barrel between his shoulder-blades. He’s wailing like a baby now, pain and panic in equal measure, but Berlin doesn’t let up for even a second. She’s got a thumb on the hammer, two fingers on the trigger and yes, she’s giving serious thought to finishing him off right here and now. Her vision is cloudy, muscles locked and spasming, and all she can think is _what if, what if, what if?_

What if the bastard had gotten lucky? What if just one of his bullets had ricocheted in just the right way at just the right moment and hit just the wrong target? What if Amanda was bleeding out right now? What if—

She pulls back the hammer.

“Berlin!”

It’s deliberate, the choice of name, and it cuts through to the place that’s spiralling out of control. She clenches her teeth, but that doesn’t stop them chattering. “I’ve got this,” she grits out.

“I know you do.” Amanda’s voice is a tremor, like she’s more scared of Berlin than the bastard who tried to put holes in her. “You’ve made your point, okay? He’s down.”

“I can see that.” She doesn’t release him or the gun, doesn’t ease the weight of her knee on his back, doesn’t look at the blood seeping through his shirt. She doesn’t let herself soften at all; her whole body is shaking now, halfway numb with shock and adrenaline and the voice of experience reminding her of just how badly this might have ended, might still end if she takes the compassionate path. “How about we keep him that way?”

“No.”

Amanda has a hand on her arm now, strong and steadying. Berlin has no idea how the hell she got to her side, when she crept out from behind her desk, and she doesn’t care either; she wants to shove her away, tell her to get back under there, hide and hide and _hide_ until this is all over, until the bastard is dead and they can be sure she’s safe. Her body might be shaking, but her instincts are as sharp as anything, and they are cutting themselves open with the need to see Amanda safe.

She turns her head, slow and dizzy, and realises a moment too late that it’s a mistake; she catches the light gleaming off Amanda’s eyes, and that’s all it takes for her imagination to paint a vision of bullets blasting between them, of fired-off rounds from a stolen SMG tearing through her like paper. She feels sick and scared, and though she can hear Amanda begging her to do what’s right — _“he’s just a man, just a frightened, desperate man, and he doesn’t deserve to die!”_ — she can’t shake off the visions carving their way through her. She can’t stop playing it out in her head, can’t silence the screams, _Amanda’s_ screams, impossibly loud inside her head; she can’t wash away the blood she imagines drying on her hands, the heat and the loss and _no more, no more, no more_.

“No,” she says, but it sounds nothing like Amanda’s.

Amanda squeezes her arm. “It’s over, Jess.”

Berlin breathes, or tries to. _Don’t call me that,_ she thinks. _Not here, not now, not like this_.

She knows that Amanda’s right, that this isn’t the place for hard justice and violence and death, but it doesn’t help, and it doesn’t cool her blood at all. The body under her isn’t a soldier like her or her E-Rep brothers and sisters; he’s not a fighter or a raider or any of the countless evils she’s seen in her lifetime. He’s just a miner, a hungry and desperate man who probably hasn’t eaten in days. He’s a good person in a bad situation, and she knows that. She understands, she knows, she _does_ … but Amanda is so close, and her hand is so warm, and Berlin can see the outline of the SMG on the ground, can feel the spray of bullets whistling past her, can feel the blood hot and slick against her skin, and she can’t shake those visions, can’t allow herself to be soft, to be sweet, to be like _her_.

“He wants you dead,” she whispers, but her hand is trembling on her gun just like his did. “He was trying to kill you. I can’t let that happen.”

Amanda touches her face with her free hand, so tender it hurts. “It’s not going to happen,” she says. “You’ve got him. He’s down. It’s over.”

It’s not, though. It’s never over.

Again and again, she finds herself here, hunched over someone who shouldn’t be, crying over the body of someone she loves or screaming over the body of someone she’s shot. This isn’t the first time she’s got carried away in a moment of violence, not the first time she’s had to be dragged away from some trigger-happy asshole before she went too far. It’s not the first time she’s felt a warm hand on her arm, a soft voice in her ear, a reminder that it’s ‘over’, and it’s sure as hell not the first time she’s looked down at someone she wants to kill and understood exactly why they’re here.

Amanda pulls her back, just far enough that she can turn the poor bastard over. He cries out, pain and blood gushing, and Berlin tries not to see red too as a flood of it covers her hands.

“Don’t,” she chokes out, the part of her that understands forcing its way out of her. “Don’t—”

She does, though. Of course she does.

Blithe, sweet Amanda. Compassionate, empathic, and she says she understands but she doesn’t _know_. Not like Berlin, not like someone who has been here so many times, who understands in the way an animal does, who has starved and lost and been desperate. Amanda doesn’t know what desperation is, what it does to even the kindest souls; she doesn’t know the panic that comes with being seen, with being recognised and known and understood. She doesn’t _know_ , and that goddamn empathy of hers is going to kill them both.

She’s got that sad smile on her face, all mayoral glamour and polite empathy, and Berlin knows that she means well but that’s not what a starving, angry, desperate young man will see. He can’t afford to, not any more. He’s already lost everything; he won’t let her take his pride as well, not when it’s the only thing he has, the only thing left in the whole damn world. Berlin knows that, feels it right down to her bones, and she knows what’s coming, knows how this will end, knows what she herself would have done do if this had happened fifteen years ago.

Amanda is gentle. For all three of them, she is so damn gentle, but she’s the only one, and of course it’s inevitable that he’ll lash out the instant he gets an arm free, of course it’s inevitable that he’ll scream and howl and slash at the air, that he’ll fight like the wild thing he’s become, that he’ll do whatever it takes to hold on to the only thing he has left.

And, yeah, maybe it’s inevitable too, that Berlin will do exactly the same thing.

It’s her fault. He’s panicking, lashing out, and so is she, but she’s the one who should know better. She’s the one who’s been here before, been on both sides of moments like this, and she’s the one who should be listening to her higher instincts, to Amanda’s softness and compassion, to all the places inside both of them that know this is wrong. Should be, yes, but she’s not, and she doesn’t and yes, it’s her fault but no, she can’t stop herself.

She’s as violent as he is, maybe even more so; she throws herself into the space between his body and Amanda’s, lashing out with far more force than he could manage with a busted-ass shoulder; she’s blind with desperation, blind with fury just like he is, and neither one of them are in control. He’s bare-fisted, but she’s not, and it’s a different kind of inevitable, a different kind of horrible, the way she lifts the gun, the way her fingers turn to steel on the grip, the way his eyes go wide behind all those layers, the way she sees her own pain reflected there.

The memories surge up in a desperate scream, hers and his and both of them together; Amanda is screaming as well but she’s so far away from them both, so far away from all of this, and Berlin closes her eyes for just a moment, less than a heartbeat, just long enough to pray that she stays that way. Less than a heartbeat, maybe, but it’s more than enough; the gun twists in the space between them, his fingers locking with hers, tangling and twisting and turning.

They go for the trigger, her and him together, and all Berlin can think in the split-second before it goes off is _not her, not Amanda, not her, not her, not her—_

—and then she doesn’t think anything, and then it’s just white and red and noise, the explosion from the gun and the scream from his throat and the gasp dying in hers, and the heat and so much blood, so much pain, _so much_ —

—and then the sudden rush of air, the deafening silence as it all dissolves, as the screams go silent and the pain goes numb, as the heat turns to haze and the world turns upside down, turns in on itself, turns and turns and turns, to the other side of a camera lens, to fade-in and fade-out, to feeling, to fading, to—

—to finally, _finally_ knowing what Tommy must have felt, what her mother and her brother must have felt, what all those stacked bodies in Reverie must have felt, to finally feeling it for herself, to finally knowing, to finally understanding, to—

—to nothing, to everything, to nothing—

—to dying, to dying, to _dying_ —

—

—to _breathing_ , and knowing that she’s not.

For a very, very long time, that’s all she has. Breathing, and the sound of it echoing in her ears, ragged in one moment and even in the next, loud and quiet and everything in between. She can’t see anything, can’t feel anything, can’t hear anything beyond the echo of it, the rhythm and the volume and the way it vibrates all through her. _In, out, in, out_ , like the whore she bought for herself that night at the NeedWant, like someone else lying behind her, like Amanda’s arms around her waist, like Tommy whispering in her ear, like her mother’s mouth shaping _‘I love you’_ in the instant before she died. Like feeling, like _home_ , like being safe and warm and protected, like being alive and not alone.

She tries to count the breaths, measure the distance between them, but the world is a blur and she’s fading in and out; she can’t keep time, can’t keep numbers or thoughts or words, can’t catch anything at all. It’s a kind of limbo, like existence without truly existing, and she can’t hold on to anything, can’t keep track of the moments between the moments, the beats between the beats and the breaths and the blood.

 _Blood_. That’s the next thing she has. It’s sharp and metallic, sticky against her teeth and tangy on her tongue. It doesn’t mean much, but it means that she’s alive. Breath and blood, and isn’t that all a life is? She can breathe and she can bleed, and she can feel all of those things, all those little places and parts that make up a person. Tongue, teeth, taste. They’re there, and they’re her, and they’re real. Sensation and solidity, tactile and true and…

…and _pain_.

That’s the last thing she has, and it pulls her out, pulls her _up_. It drags her of the emptiness, the endless silence and the beats between breaths, the non-existent existence, drags her away from all of that, violent and forceful and awful, like a fish being hauled out of the water, the only world it’s ever known, and into a mess of colour and chaos, a new world where it can’t breathe and can’t see. It carves through the black-grey-nothing all around her, carves through the rhythm pulsing in her ears, carves through the _‘in, out, in, out’_ until there’s no _‘out’_ at all, until it’s only _in, in, IN_.

“Doc!”

Amanda. Through the chaos and the clamour, the noise and the bright lights and the pain that tears the breath and the blood out of her, through all of that she recognises her voice. _Amanda_ , alive just like she is, and with her comes everything else, all the things she’d forgotten, all those things she never even knew she’d missed until she’s surrounded by them again. Warmth all around her, salt stinging her face, pressure over her palm, her fingers, softness and compassion, but strong, so strong, so _Amanda_.

“All right, all right, hold your horses…”

And then the doc’s there too. Yewll with her perpetual calm, her quick wit and her wry sarcasm and all those things Berlin loves and hates about her. Yewll with her quiet instructions and medical jargon, with so many things that Berlin can’t grasp, meanings she’s too scrambled and screwed up to catch. She’s snapping at her, mouth an open hole in a blank white face, and Berlin can hear the words but she doesn’t understand.

“Lie still,” she says, and “shut up,” and “don’t make me shoot you again,” and Berlin doesn’t know what any of that means, but she doesn’t care. It’s words, it’s contact, it’s not being alone. 

She tries to sit up, to reach for them, for Yewll or Amanda or both of them, the softness and the strength or the wit and the jargon, either one of them; she tries to lift herself up and find their faces, but the pain won’t let her move. It sets her nerves on fire, ignites all the places she’s only just remembered having — teeth and tongue and all the rest of it, places that aren’t even supposed to feel anything at all — and drives her back down, drives her back under.

It all bleeds out again, their faces and their voices, even the sound of her own breathing, that awful _‘in, out, in, out’_ ; it all disappears, lost to the void, and for a long, long time she really is alone. Completely alone, lost and empty and so, so scared.

It’s not fair, she thinks, a child’s thoughts cutting through the endless nothing. It’s not fair that she has to feel all of this, that the pain is carving through her breath, that the fear is swelling and breaking over her head, that there’s nothing left of her but the things she’s spent her whole life running from. She can’t think or move; she’s barely even there at all, but still somehow they won’t let her die.

It’s not fair. It’s not right. It _hurts_ , and that’s not fair either. The pain lances through her, the only thing she can feel, and she tries to breathe through it, but she doesn’t remember what breathing is. It hurts, trying to remember, trying to feel and think and hear and _be_ , trying to push through the emptiness, trying to exist when that’s the last thing in the world she wants to do. It’s not fair that she has to, not fair that she can’t stop.

She floats like that for what feels like an eternity, hurting and helpless, but when she finally surfaces again the world is solid and makes sense.

The pain is duller now, an endless throb split between her ribs and her navel, and her senses are sharper. She can see and she can hear and she can think, can even breathe a little if she tries real hard; she’s strong enough now to bite down on the need to scream, aware enough to know where she is and why, and brave enough to resist the urge when it rises up in her, the sudden desperate need to tear herself open and die.

Something squeezes her hand. “Hey,” it says, and Berlin thinks _Amanda_.

She can’t find her face, doesn’t trust herself to move and search for it, but she can hear the smile in her voice and she knows that she’s there. She can feel it, the sweetness and the softness, all those things that mean _her_ ; the air gets warm, and the sharp edges soften to something less distinct, something a little less brutal. It feels like getting too close to a fire or a heating vent, like a fever without feeling sick, the kind of heat that means _hearth_ or _heart_ , that means _home_. It makes her feel safe, comfortable in a way she knows she shouldn’t, in a way that she knows should frighten her, but she doesn’t have enough strength left for fear.

“Hey.” It’s not much, but it’s her own voice, and that’s something. “Still not dead?”

Amanda laughs, tearful and right on the edge of madness. “No,” she says, very quietly. “You’re still not dead.”

“Not for want of trying.”

That’s Doc Yewll, and Berlin doesn’t get the chance to try and look for her; she’s already right there, leaning in to flood her field of vision. She’s wearing her trademark glare, and while Berlin might normally not be intimidated, it’s hard not to feel a twinge of panic when she’s flat on her back, immobile, and that face is all she can see.

“Uh…” she starts, but that’s all Yewll lets her get out.

“Yeah, yeah. Save it for someone who cares.” She folds her arms, leans in a little closer. “Now listen up, because I’m not repeating myself. One: you’re going to stay still. Two: you’re going to behave yourself. Three: you’re not going to complain. Four: under no circumstances are you allowed to insult my needlework. Five: you are going to do all of those things for exactly as long as I tell you to, and not a second less. Keeping up so far?”

Berlin opens her mouth, but no sound comes out.

“Excellent. Glad to see it takes more than a near-fatal gut-shot to rob you of that rapier wit.” She turns to Amanda. “I only take cash.”

Amanda snorts another laugh, softer and saner this time. “You’re all heart, Doc.”

Berlin tries to swallow, tries to find something inside of her strong enough to speak, but her mouth is too dry and her throat hurts like hell. She ends up coughing instead, weak little sputters that tug at the place where it hruts, that pull and pierce until the pain nearly blinds her. It takes every ounce of strength she has not to cry out, and of course there’s not enough left by the time it passes to choke back the tears.

“Easy,” Amanda says, and then she’s holding a glass of water to Berlin’s lips. “Take it easy.”

She’s achingly gentle, one hand on the glass and the other under Berlin’s chin, tilting her face up and helping her to drink. Berlin’s desperately thirsty, but she knows better than to gulp it all down. She goes slowly, takes it easy just like Amanda says; honestly, it’s more wetting her lips than really drinking, but it helps just the same, the contact almost more than the water. Enough that she can catch her breath, at least. Enough that when she tries to swallow again she almost manages it, and when she tries to speak the words don’t sound half-dead.

“You hurt?”

It’s the first thing she thinks of, the only thing that matters. She can put the rest of it together herself, as soon as her head clears itself and she can think straight again; it’s not exactly rocket science, is it? Between the close proximity, the handgun, and her own damn stupidity, the story practically tells itself. None of that matters at all; the only thing does is making sure that she’s the only one she hurt, that Amanda was clear and safe and unhurt. It’s the only thing she cares about, the only thing in the whole wide world. She won’t lose anyone else. She won’t lose Amanda, even if it means she has to bleed her own damn guts out. She’d sooner die a thousand times… hell, she’d sooner _not_ die, so long as it means that Amanda doesn’t either.

Amanda brushes her jaw, tickling and tentative as she takes the glass away. “Not at all.”

Berlin’s whole body goes limp with relief. “Promise?”

“I promise.” Her smile is incredible. “I’m fine. You’re not, but I guess you’ve already figured that part out for yourself.”

“Yeah.” Berlin feels ill. She swallows again. “I thought I was dead.”

Amanda strokes her cheek; it’s soft, simple, but there’s a tremor in her fingertips that says she understands. “I know you did.”

She sounds so damn sad, so completely broken. She knows what that means, can see how deep it cuts for someone like Berlin, someone who has spent days, maybe even weeks by now, wishing that she could trade in her life for someone else’s, wishing that she could be dead in their place. Amanda can’t possibly feel the weight of all that guilt and pain, but she can see it and she can understand.

“How touching,” Yewll quips, cutting them both off before their hearts can break completely. “Now, if we’re all done celebrating the miracle of life, someone needs to take a nap before they get cranky.” She fixes Berlin with another pointed look. “That means you, kitten.”

Berlin tries to shake her head, tries to protest, but she’s already too tired to move; whatever she’s trying to say, it dies in her throat, and maybe that’s for the best because she honestly has no idea whether she wanted to say _‘I’m fine’_ or _‘I’m broken.’_ The pain is throbbing, a rhythm like a heartbeat across her side and her stomach, a pulse that burns like breathing; there’s too much going on around her, too much noise and too much light, too much of Amanda’s tenderness and too much of Doc Yewll’s sober-faced sarcasm. There’s too much of everything, and she can’t focus on anything at all.

“Please.” It’s worthless. She doesn’t know what she’s asking for any more than Yewll or Amanda do. All she knows is that she doesn’t want to be like this. “ _Please_.”

“Ah-ah-ah…” Yewll taps her on the nose with something that looks like a pencil. The snap of contact vibrates unpleasantly under her skin, but it doesn’t make the pain any worse than it already is. “Lie down. Stay. Roll over.” Berlin doesn’t do any of those things, but apparently it’s enough that she’s already horizontal because Yewll taps her on the nose again and says “Good girl,” like she’s talking to a damn puppy.

Berlin is definitely not a puppy, but she’s not above using her teeth to get her point across if that’s what she needs to do. Unfortunately for her (and probably fortunately for Yewll), Amanda cuts in before she gets the chance.

“It’s okay,” she says, and it’s so damn hard not to believe her when she pitches her voice like that, when she turns her hand just so and lets the backs of her fingers ghost along Berlin’s cheek, when she smiles at her like she lights up the world. “Defiance can take care of itself for a couple of hours. Get some rest, okay?”

 _I don’t want to,_ Berlin thinks, but of course she has no choice in the matter. Her body isn’t exactly hers right now, at least not enough that she can control it the way she wants to. She tries to resist, to turn away from them both, but Yewll’s already way ahead of her; a prick of pain, a blur closing in from the edge of her vision, and she knows she’s screwed.

She tries to sit up, tries to resist. _‘Don’t do that!’_ she wants to cry, and _‘get your hands off me!’_ and _‘I don’t want your chupping drugs!’_ She wants to be herself, to show that she can still muster a moment of defiance, but all she gets out is a whine and a sigh.

Yewll touches her neck, testing her pulse for a beat or two, then nods her approval. “Obedient. I like it.” She turns to Amanda. “Don’t suppose you’ll let me keep her like this?”

Berlin hates that her damn smirk is the last thing she sees.

—

She drifts in and out of consciousness for what feels like forever.

Honestly, there’s a part of her that can’t help wishing that it was. It’s easier to exist like this, floating and not entirely real. Easier to exist without the burden of feeling, of guilt and pain and shame, of being unworthy. Easier to waste away on a bed, eating through tubes and needles and whatever else, forgotten and forgetting. So much easier to exist when she doesn’t have to live as well.

When she dreams, it’s feverish and nightmare-sharp, bright lights and vivid colours. She sees faceless bodies with their insides bleeding out, and bodiless faces with the voices of people she used to love. She sees Tommy, shaking his head and wondering why she wasn’t there, why she still isn’t there, asking her again and again why she forgot him. She hears her mother and her brother, yelling at her through a thick haze, their voices distorted and disjointed; it’s been so long now, she can hardly even remember what they sound like, and their faces are blurred and indistinct when they look her in the eye and ask if she ever loved them. She barely remembers them at all, but when they dissolve in a splatter of blood and bone she sobs herself awake and has to be sedated all over again.

The pain stays with her through everything, a dull relentless throb that underscores the dreams and the void and the half-waking moments in between. It pulses in rhythm with her heartbeat, warm and sometimes wet, the only constant when everything else is twisting and turning and shifting into something new; it’s the one thing that doesn’t change even when the rest of the world does, even when her own worthless senses leave her lonely and broken and faltering. It’s like an anchor, the pain, unbearably heavy but grounding as well; it stops her from moving, holds her in place, and it’s the helplessness so much more than the weight that breaks her.

Amanda stays by her side. Berlin isn’t aware of very much; beyond the pain and the haze and the voices of people long dead, everything sort of blurs and bleeds and blends together, but no amount of blurring could take that away from her, the warmth and the compassion and all those things that keep her alive, the silver lining tugging at the pain-anchor. She can feel her presence even when she’s under, as familiar as anything she’s ever known, as sure as Tommy ever was, as true as all her lost families ever were, her mother and her brother, her E-Rep brethren, as sure and true as everything always is… until it’s not, until it dies or points a gun at her face or just plain disappears.

She keeps waiting for that, the moment when she wakes up to find herself alone, but it never comes. Amanda is always there; every time without fail, she’s right there, holding her hand and keeping time with her breathing.

She has to go away sometimes; that much is obvious. She has to eat and piss, for a start, and probably sleep, and that’s not counting the fact that she has a town to run. Defiance is in a crisis, or at least it’s building up to one, and the mayor can’t afford to take a lifetime’s worth of personal time for some idiot who isn’t even conscious most of the time. She has work to do, and Berlin knows that her sense of duty is too damn powerful to keep her from it. She has to be doing something more with her time than just sitting around and holding her hand. She has to be; even Berlin’s scrambled brain knows that.

And yet every single time she wakes, there she is.

She doesn’t know how to react to that, doesn’t know what to do or think or feel. Most of the time she’s so doped and delirious that she can’t even string a cohesive sentence together, much less digest her feelings, and even if she wasn’t she can hardly remember how to deal with moments like this.

It’s been forever since she took a bullet as bad as this, the kind that goes right through and leaves her on her back for days or weeks or worse, the kind that almost kills. It’s been forever since she had someone sitting at her side, since she had someone to hold her hand and give her water and touch her face, since she had someone who helped her to breathe. Not even Tommy got to do that. Not even Conrad. Even on their best days, she never let herself need them like this.

Amanda’s hand is warm, but her smile is warmer. Berlin wants to thank her, wants to drown in all that warmth, but all that comes out when she opens her mouth to say so is the same awful question, the same hopelessness, the same worthless shtak over and over again.

“Still not dead?”

And of course Amanda’s smile flickers. Never completely, but always a little, always just enough. She hears the question, feels the pain behind it as deep and raw as if it were her own, and when she nods and sighs she looks almost as haunted as Berlin feels.

“No,” she says, softer and softer every time. “You’re still not dead.”

Berlin swallows. Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes it’s easy, but every single time it hurts. “Okay,” she says, and braces for the sting behind her eyes.

Amanda squeezes her hand, leans in close. “Hey.”

Every time. A dozen times, maybe a thousand, exactly the same. A dozen times, a thousand times Berlin claws her way back to consciousness and asks the same stupid question. A dozen times, a thousand times Amanda lets her smile flicker, lets Berlin see the parts of her that understand, and gives the same stupid answer. A dozen times, a thousand times they do this, and it always ends exactly the same way: a moment of contact, and a whispered _‘hey.’_

It shouldn’t mean as much as it does. It shouldn’t feel like more than it is, more than words, more than a question and an answer, more than a shaken smile and a squeeze of her hand. It shouldn’t feel like it’s something important, something that runs parallel to the places that hurt. It shouldn’t swallow her like it does, shouldn’t leave her feeling so lost and so thoroughly loved. But it does, and that is so frightening. So much kindness in one place, so much softness in one soul, and she doesn’t know what to do with it. She doesn’t know how to use Amanda’s smile to balm the bullet-pain, and she doesn’t know how to use her voice to soothe the hurt in her heart.

“Hey,” Amanda says again.

Berlin doesn’t say anything. She just turns her face away, and lets Amanda kiss away the tears.

—


	7. Chapter 7

—

She heals slowly.

It’s not like strapped fingers, testing limits and using them when she shouldn’t, mending more by dumb luck than actual care. It’s not like bruises from a bad fight or the hangover after a great night, not like taking one too many hits or drinks and sleeping it off the next day. Those are simple injuries, fixed with a little sleep and a little ice, and they’re nothing like this.

This is the kind of injury she used to get as a soldier, the kind that’s taken up permanent residence in her dreams ever since Reverie, ever since Pottinger’s office and _‘the Earth Republic thanks you for your service.’_ It’s the kind of injury she thought she’d never see again, the kind of healing that means lying flat on her back for days and days, the kind that comes with drugs and restlessness and cabin fever.

She doesn’t enjoy the change of scenery, the blank white ceiling and the static hum of machines; she doesn’t enjoy Yewll’s constant bustle, coming and going at all hours of the day and night, or the way the stupid bed is always digging into her back. She definitely doesn’t enjoy the pain, the endless throb when she’s still and the stomach-churning tug when she tries to move. Most of all, though, she doesn’t enjoy the way all of this free time forces her to think about all those things she doesn’t want to.

It’s a few days before they talk about what happened, and of course it’s not easy when they do.

Amanda’s the one who brings it up, talking her through it like she’s narrating one of Berlin’s propaganda films. It’s hard to know exactly why she does it, whether she genuinely thinks that recounting all the gory details will bring Berlin some measure of closure or whether she’s just fumbling for something to say, anything to fill the silence and the space stretching out between them. Either way, it doesn’t work; frankly, Berlin would prefer a decade’s worth of silence to a blow-by-blow account of a close-proximity gut-shot.

“You can say it, you know,” she blurts out, about halfway through Amanda’s exposition.

Amanda studies her for a long moment, brows knitting together. “Say what?”

“You know. _‘It was your fault. You were reckless. You should never have had that gun in your hand in the first place.’_ All that shtak.” It stings, putting it that way, but she won’t deny it. “We both know it’s true, so you might as well say it.”

Amanda sighs. “Would it make a difference if I did?”

Berlin thinks about it for a minute, tries to piece the moment together in her head. The blind panic, his and hers, and too many fumbling hands. The gun between their bodies, the hammer and the trigger, the desperation surging up in both of them. It was stupidity, nothing more and nothing less; they were both reckless, and they both made the same mistake, but the weight of it falls on Berlin because she’s the one who should have known better. She’s supposed to have a clear head, supposed to be carrying town on her shoulders, supposed to be their goddamn lawkeeper.

The whole stupid mess is just one more reason why she should never have stuck around in the first place, just one more piece of evidence that she’ll only let them down in the end. And no, it won’t make the least bit of difference whether Amanda says it or not. They both know it’s out there. Neither of them are _that_ stupid.

“Guess not,” she mutters, and closes her eyes.

Amanda touches her hand, her face. “We’ll talk about it when you’re back on your feet,” she promises. “Work through it together.”

“Make sure it never happens again, right?” She doesn’t even bother trying to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

“Don’t put words in my mouth.” Another sigh, this one heavier. “You think I don’t know why you did it? You think I don’t know why you panicked, why you lost control?” Berlin shakes her head, and Amanda grips her hand just a little too tightly. “ _Together_ , Jess. You and me, and if you think for one second that I’m going to let you do something like that ever again…” Her voice cracks. “No chance. No way. You don’t want me to die, that’s fine. But you don’t get to die either. Not for my sake. Not ever. Are we clear?”

Berlin swallows very hard. She wants to cry, but she knows it would hurt like hell if she did, and not just in the place where she's been torn open. “It’s not…”

“No.” Amanda has never sounded so fragile before, so close to breaking. “You’re not the only one who’s scared of losing the people you care about. You’re not the only one… you…”

“Amanda, don’t.”

Her heart is in her mouth, pounding way too hard. It crashes over her, a wave of something like terror, and it’s only when she hears the bleeping from one of Yewll’s machines that she realises it’s not normal, that it’s probably not good. She’s been feeling this way for so long now that she can’t remember what it’s like to not feel it, to not panic in moments like this, to not lose herself when her emotions burn too hot. She’s breathless and in terrible pain, and she wants to look at Amanda and ask if this is something they can ‘work through together’ as well, if Amanda’s cock-eyed optimism has a cure-all for the way she can’t breathe, but she never gets the chance.

Yewll is already there, shaking her head and blessedly taking the matter into her own hands. She casts a critical eye over the machine, presses a few buttons to silence the bleeping, then gives Berlin a shot of something that makes her vision blur.

“This isn’t a party zone, kids,” she snaps, annoyed. “Some of us need our rest. Some of us have work to do.” She cuts a glance at Amanda. “And some of us shouldn’t be here in the first place.”

Amanda musters a wry grin; it’s wan by her usual standards, but it still strikes both of them dumb. “Slow day in the office,” she says, with a shrug that doesn’t fool anyone.

“Of course it is,” Yewll deadpans. She fusses with Berlin’s wound for a moment or two, probably just to make a point, then sweeps away. “At least try to keep it down to a dull roar. Contrary to what you might have been told, I do more in this town than patch up trigger-happy children who don’t know one end of a gun from the other. And you’re in my way.”

“Sorry,” Amanda says, with no sincerity whatsoever, then turns back to Berlin. “Like I said, we’ll talk about it when you’re back on your feet.”

Berlin bites her lip. It hurts a bit, but it brings the room back into focus, shakes off a little of the dizziness from Yewll’s drug. “I don’t think talking is going to help,” she says softly. “Not with this.”

“Maybe not,” Amanda concedes. “But frankly, Jess, I don’t care. I almost lost you because you were so scared of losing me. That can’t happen again. I can’t do my job if you can’t do yours, and you can’t protect me if you won’t protect yourself as well. This town is going through hell right now, and it’s only going to get worse. It needs both of us. And I need…”

“Amanda.”

“I need _you_. Okay? I need you by my side, and I need you alive.”

Berlin takes a deep breath, closes her eyes. “I am.”

Amanda finds her hand. It’s hard to tell which of the two of them are trembling more. “For now,” she says.

She doesn’t say _‘what about tomorrow?’_ , but Berlin hears it just the same. She thinks about giving an answer, but she doesn’t. Too much, too close, and she’s already in so much pain; why inflict more? 

So, instead, she closes her eyes, lets the pitching of the room take her back. She remembers the NeedWant, that first night, her too drunk to stand and Amanda helping her up the stairs, the way her body rocked the bed, the smell of perfume that made her feel sick. It’s easy to lose herself like that, dissociate and vanish from her body, from her present, to leave the world that is and remember the world that was, darker things than a whore’s bedroom, worse memories than too much to drink. It’s not so far back, all the other stuff, the numb soldier lined up in front of a firing squad, the grieving woman sobbing over Tommy’s body… and further still, the scared, lonely kid left to fend for herself. It’s entirely too easy to remember what that felt like, the hunger and the desperation, all those things that asshole miner must have felt in the moment he squeezed the trigger.

“What about him?” she hears herself ask, blurting the question out almost before she realises she’s thinking about it.

It’s a long moment before Amanda realises what she’s talking about and ventures an answer. “He’s alive too,” she says, very quietly.

Berlin swallows hard, wets her lips. She doesn’t know how to feel about that, doesn’t know what it’s supposed to mean. Her head aches, a dull pounding like a migraine behind her eyes, and it hurts to think of him and remember what it felt like to be in his place, to be so hungry and so desperate that she’d do worse things than shoot up some fancy office, that she’d do worse things than threaten a mayor. If she’d been just a little older, a little more hungry, a little more of so many little things… well. Dead or alive, she sure as hell wouldn’t be here.

“He tried to kill you,” she says, and wonders why it sounds so hollow, why she can’t bring herself to be as angry as she was in the moment. “Maybe he would have killed you.”

Amanda acknowledges with a tilt of her head. “Maybe he would have,” she says. “But he didn’t.”

“Didn’t kill me either,” Berlin starts, then has to cut herself off because the lump that swells in her throat is almost more painful than the hole in her side. She thinks of Reverie, of corpses littering the floor, of the way she survived and they didn’t. “Nearly did, though, didn’t he?”

“He nearly did.” Amanda squeezes her fingers. “And you nearly killed him, too. Or nearly killed yourself. An inch to the left, a centimetre to the right…” Her hands are shaking ever so slightly. “That’s a lot of ‘nearly’, though, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” She swallows again; it only makes the pain worse. “So what… where do we draw the line? When’s it okay? When’s it not okay? I would have put a bullet through his head when he had that thing pointed at you. Ended up putting one inside myself instead. And now… now…”

“Now it’s over,” Amanda says. “It’s over, it’s okay, and we’re all alive.” She closes her eyes for just a moment, like a blink that lasts a beat too long. “That’s where we draw the line.”

Berlin tries to picture it. Strong and solid, a mark that says _‘this is it,’_ etched out in Amanda’s neat cursive, or printed neat and clean on a soldier’s report, or scribbled in chalk by a scared, lonely kid. A lot of different lines telling a lot of different stories; funny how they all intersect.

 _It’s over,_ she thinks. _It’s over, it’s okay, and we’re all alive._ And, maybe that works for now, for once, but what about the next time? What about the next Reverie, the next trigger-happy sergeant putting holes in frightened convicts? What about the next Tommy, knifed by an ex-lover for being too soft? Defiance is a town full of threats, and Berlin isn’t the sort of person who can keep death at bay for very long. One day, it will find her, or find the people she cares about, just like it always does. One day, it won’t be as simple as _‘it’s over, it’s okay, and we’re all alive.’_ One day, none of those things will be true, and what the hell are they supposed to do then?

“That’s not much of a line,” she hears herself whisper.

Amanda sighs. “No, it’s not. But it’s better than nothing, don’t you think?”

Berlin thinks of the explosion, the gunshot and the pain and the wonderful, horrible moment when she thought she was dying. “No,” she says. “No, I don’t think it is.”

Amanda sighs. “Jess.” Her eyes are bright and wet and devastatingly beautiful; they say more than she ever could with words. Berlin wants to drown in them. “You can’t find closure if you’re dead.”

Berlin looks away. “Might not be able to find it alive either.”

It’s not easy, admitting that aloud, and she is so, so terrified that Amanda will tell her to be better, demand that she suck it up and find some shred of optimism in the fact that she’s still breathing. That’s what she supposed to be doing, right? That’s what she really meant when she said _‘I need you alive,’_ and Berlin is so frightened that it won’t be enough, that Amanda will see in her eyes that she’s not, that she’s not ready to be, that she’ll see in her eyes that she isn’t and won’t ever be good enough, and that will be the end of it.

It feels like forever since Tommy, since Reverie, since she started feeling this way. She has a job now, a place to live, a town to defend and a mayor to protect. She has a hundred things she can use to distance herself from her old life, from her Earth Republic family and the things they did, from the impotence and the guilt that surges inside her every time she remembers that she survived Reverie and then remembers that Tommy couldn’t survive Irisa. She has so many reasons to be better, to be stronger, to be more, and no excuse to still be feeling the way she does.

It should be enough. She’s a different person now, almost unrecognisable, and she knows that should be all she needs, knows that it should be the _something_ Amanda keeps telling her about. It should be, yes, but it’s not; she hates that, hates her own weakness, but not nearly as much as she hates the thought of disappointing Amanda, of seeing the brightness fade from her eyes and the smile disappear without a trace. She hates herself, all of herself, but so much more than that, she hates that Amanda might see the person she’s always been and hate her too.

 _I’m sorry,_ she wants to say, but she doesn’t get the chance. Amanda, like always, is right there, and she doesn’t let her drown. She lets go of her hand, steadies herself on the bed, and leans in as close as she can get. Her lips are cool against Berlin’s forehead, then wet against her cheek.

“Hey,” she says, ever so softly. “It doesn’t matter if you do. What matters is that you can.”

Berlin doesn’t really see the difference, but of course that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that Amanda isn’t turning away, isn’t shaking her head and rolling her eyes, isn’t telling Berlin that she has to be better, that she needs to find that ever-elusive closure or they’re done. She’s not telling her that it’s easy, that she’s had all the time in the world, isn’t telling her to just wave a hand and be better. Berlin’s so afraid that she will, but she doesn’t. She just feathers her lips over the lines of her face, tentative little butterfly kisses to her forehead and cheek and the corners of her mouth, whispers and breaths and promises.

 _‘What matters is that you can,’_ she says, but she really means _‘what matters is you.’_

Berlin’s pretty sure that’s not true. But Amanda believes that it is, and when she catches Berlin’s lips with her own the tenderness is so profound, so perfect, that first time in a lifetime Berlin finds that she wants to believe it too.

—

Yewll lets her leave much earlier than she should.

“It’s not you, it’s me,” she says, and and that’s more or less the truth. In the absence of an active lawkeeper (even a dubious surrogate one like Berlin), there’s a flood of people showing up on the doorstep, an endless torrent of broken bones and knife-wounds and worse things besides, and the good doctor’s hands and beds have been full for days. Berlin might be quiet and out of the way, but she’s still taking up space, and that’s quickly becoming something Yewll and her clinic can’t afford. So, on the proviso that Amanda keep an eye on her, she gives Berlin a less-than-gentle pat on the shoulder, says “take one for the team, slugger,” and sends her on her way.

Berlin’s not exactly comfortable, and experience has taught her that she’s not even close to healthy yet, but it doesn’t take a genius to measure Yewll’s stress levels right now, and she doesn’t want to be any more of a burden on that than she already is. So, just like always, she does what she’s told, forcing a smile a _‘yes, sir’_ and pretending that it doesn’t feel like her belly is ripping itself open when she steps down from the bed, pretending that she doesn’t need Amanda’s supportive arm as much as she does. It’s terrible, how unsteady she is, how being upright feels like the worst kind of hangover, but she bites down on her tongue and doesn’t let it show.

“Keep her in bed,” Yewll says to Amanda. “Tie her down, use sexual favours, I don’t care. Hell, do both and have yourselves a party. Just make sure she stays horizontal.”

Amanda chuckles. “You’re asking the impossible, Doc.”

It’s truer than any of them want to admit, and not just because Berlin can be a stubborn ass when she wants to. Defiance can’t afford any of this, and all three of them know it. It can’t afford a lawkeeper who can’t stay on her feet, and it sure as shtako can’t afford a mayor who’s so distracted by some minor altercation that she’s not doing her job. Fact is, they’ve both been off the streets for way too long already, and if Yewll really thinks for a second that either one of them will be laying low and keeping horizontal, she’s… well, not the doctor any of them thought she was.

But, of course, she is. The same genius, the same expert, the same good doc she’s always been, and of course she knows exactly what’s going to happen the instant she lets them both out of her sight. It’s just that she doesn’t have any choice either.

It’s all right there in the way she sighs, weary and sleep-deprived, or whatever the hell passes for ‘sleep-deprived’ in an Indogene. “Fine,” she says, though they all know it’s not. “Just don’t come crying to me when that wound pulls open and she bleeds out. I don’t have the bandages or the patience.”

Berlin squints at the floor. It’s swerving. “Duly noted.”

Yewll gives her a hard look, then rolls her eyes. “You need painkillers, you come to me. Self-medicating is bad, kids.”

“Worked well enough until now,” Amanda quips.

“For you, maybe. But this one has the constitution of a squirrel.” She runs her eyes over Berlin, cynical but not as judgemental as one might expect. No doubt she figures a lousy constitution is a step-up from liquid lunches every other day. “And speaking of which: for the love of Christmas, lay off the booze until you can see straight.”

Berlin snorts. “I can see just fine.”

(The floor doesn’t really agree, but of course she never asked for its opinion.)

Yewll actually musters a chuckle at that. “Of course you can.”

“All right, all right.” Amanda clears her throat, cutting in quickly before they resort to hissing and spitting at each other. “I think we can handle it.”

Yewll pats her on the ass. “Keep telling yourself that, slim. Now get the heck out of here before I remember where I left my common sense.”

Berlin doesn’t need telling twice, but her body does. Her limbs are stiff and incredibly weak after so long stuck on her back, and it’s a very long time before she can will them into moving, before she can put one foot in front of the other and turn herself towards the door. Amanda helps, of course, but Berlin’s pride doesn’t let her lean too heavily or for too long.

She feels like a baby animal learning to walk for the first time, unsteady and very vulnerable. A part of her wants to apologise, the part that prides itself on being strong and tall and capable, but of course she knows there wouldn’t be a point. Amanda would just wave it away, laugh and lie and pretend it’s okay, and Yewll probably wouldn’t even listen at all; a wry quip, a slap on the wrist, and _‘it’s so adorable that you think I care,’_ and that would be the end of it.

Still, though, she has to do something, has to remind herself that she has some kind of autonomy over some little piece of herself, so she clings to the only thing she has left, pain and frustration and mindless cursing.

“Shtak.” It’s not nearly enough, but at least it’s something. “Shtak, shtak, _shtak_.”

Her legs shake under her, wobbly and unaccustomed to so much exertion, and Amanda holds her steady. “Take it easy,” she says. “Don’t push yourself so hard.”

She’s so forgiving, just like Berlin knew she would be, and she hates that more than she can put into words. She wants anger, wants something with bite; she wants Amanda to tell her that the whole damn town is depending on them, that they can’t afford to screw around like this, that she’s the reason the town is in a state of chaos right now. She wants Amanda to blame her like she blames herself, wants her to point fingers and show her teeth, make her hurt for her mistakes, but she doesn’t. She just holds her and keeps her upright, helps her to put one foot in front of the other, and when Berlin looks at her with a wordless plea in her eyes she just smiles and pushes back her hair.

It’s too much. Too much sweetness, too much sympathy, too much of too many things that she can’t stomach, and if she had the strength for more than the same worthless syllable over and over again Berlin would take her by the collar and shake her until Amanda had no choice but to shake her back.

They don’t go back to the NeedWant. Berlin tries to, head spinning with how desperately she wants to fall into those feather pillows and silken sheets, but Amanda has something else in mind, and before she even realises what’s going on, Berlin finds herself steered towards the lawkeeper’s office.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” she mutters.

Amanda shakes her head. “No stairs,” she explains, like she really expects Berlin to believe that’s the only reason. “Plus, it’s well-stocked. Got a mattress out back for all-nighters, kitchen, shower, you name it. Everything you need in one place. And it’ll…” She cuts herself off before she can give the real reason, though, before she can reduce Berlin to a title that still scares her. “Well. It’s closer anyway, right?”

“Closer. Sure.” Berlin takes a deep breath. It’s not easy; her chest shudders and hurts, and that makes Amanda pull her in closer. It’s hard to be strong when Amanda’s encouraging her not to be. “And the rest?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Berlin rolls her eyes. The ground shifts, and she turns to brace against the nearest wall. “You know. _‘It’ll be good for people to see the place occupied again.’_ That part.” She tries not to think of the people, the countless faceless souls all depending on her. “Make them think the town’s protected. Make them feel safe.”

Amanda sighs. “Okay, fine. That too.” There’s sorrow in her voice now, and a little bit of guilt as well, like she knows this isn’t fair on anyone, the townspeople no more than Berlin’s still-healing bullet wound. “Times are hard, and they’re only going to get harder. I know you don’t want to lull people into a false sense of security, but…”

“No. You’re right.”

She is. Berlin knows that, in a way that it still hurts to accept. She doesn’t believe in false hope, it’s true, and she knows the danger of believing in things that don’t exist, but Amanda is right too; the people of this town are going through hell, and it’s going to get a whole lot worse before it gets even a little better. Berlin might not want to be their protector, might not want to be the one they pin their hopes on, but dammit, they have to pin them _somewhere_. They have to have someone to depend on, and god knows there’s no-one else stepping up to do it.

Still, Amanda looks surprised. “I am?”

“Don’t let it go to your head,” Berlin mutters, but of course that’s all the affirmation either of them needs.

Amanda’s smile is radiant. “Thank you.”

She doesn’t sat _‘I need you’_ this time, but Berlin hears it anyway. She hates that it still hits so damn hard.

“Not going anywhere,” she says. It hurts to say it too, hurts to admit what they’ve both known known for longer than she’ll ever admit. It hurts to make it real, to come as close as she ever will to claiming this place as her own. She has to harden it, has to turn it into something stronger, something that can stand on its own even when she can’t, and her voice hitches with panic when she adds “I couldn’t afford to anyway.”

“Lucky for us,” Amanda chuckles. She sounds much more sincere than she should, like she knows the last part is a lie, and it sits uncomfortably in Berlin’s stomach, serrated and sharp like a piece of shrapnel, like the ever-present promise of pain. “You know, I’m not the only one who wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you. And I’m not the only one looking forward to seeing you up on your feet again, either.”

“Bullshtak,” Berlin snaps, just a little too quickly. “Pin that badge on a damn scarecrow, nothing would change. People would still be stabbing each other in the streets, or shooting you in your office, or whatever the hell they think they need to do to stay alive. They’ll still be scared and angry and starving, no matter what I do. It won’t fix any of that, me getting up on my feet again. It’ll just remind them of all the good stuff that the E-Rep asshole has and they don’t.”

“Ex-E-Rep asshole,” Amanda reminds her, like that was the important part, like it was the only part she heard. “That’s not what you are any more. And it’s not what we see in you.”

“Not the point, either,” Berlin mutters, petulant and in a great deal of pain.

“Oh, I think it is,” Amanda says softly. She steps away, lets Berlin hold herself up against the wall while she unlocks the door. “I think it’s been the point for a long time now. You’re not hiding from that badge because you think you don’t deserve it. You’re hiding from it because you know you _do_. You’re scared it’ll undermine everything that’s happened, all the grief and the guilt and the hell you’ve been putting yourself through. You’re scared it’ll make Tommy’s death mean less, and make your survival mean more. You’re so damn scared that if you look up and see yourself in a position that actually means something you’ll have to accept that you’re not as worthless as you think you are.”

Berlin tries to say _‘bullshtak’_ again but it hurts too much. Instead she says “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Amanda turns to meet her gaze, holds it for a long time. “And you don’t know how many people were worried about you.”

“That…” But she trails off because the words punch her right in the gut, right where the stitches are, right where it hurts. The pain blinds her for a moment, and she doubles over, gasping for breath. It’s only when Amanda lays a hand on her back that the pain subsides enough for her to gulp down a little air, and she really, really doesn’t want to think about what that means.

“Easy,” Amanda says, but it’s exactly the opposite.

Berlin shakes her head to clear it, then tries again. “You’re talking shtako. Half those people hate me because I was an E-Rep soldier, and the other half hate me because I shot them in the knees.”

Amanda bites back a laugh. “The other half hate you because you shot them in the knees,” she agrees. “But the first half stopped hating you around the time you shot the other half in the knees. You know why?” Berlin doesn’t have the strength to shake her head again, but Amanda presses on as if she had. “Because that gave them an extra hour to walk down the streets and feel safe. Because it meant _they_ weren’t getting shot in the knees. Now, don’t misinterpret that as encouragement. I don’t approve of your methods, not at all, and we will be having a very long talk about it when you’re back on your feet. But to the people out there, the people you’re sworn to protect, your brand of justice is still justice. And that’s something they’ve had to live without for far too long.”

“Yeah?”

Amanda guides her away from the wall, helps her inside. “Yes,” she says. “They understand why you do what you do. They understand why you think it’s necessary. Hell, some of them feel the same way. And the ones you’re not shooting in the knees… they’re grateful.” She guides her to the nearest chair, helps her to sit down, and has the decency to pretend she doesn’t notice the way Berlin is soaked through with sweat. “But hey. Don’t take my word for it. Get better, get out there, and see for yourself what this town thinks of you.”

Berlin sighs, squeezes her eyes shut. She’s too tired for this, and it hurts to think. “This town is full of idiots,” she says, because it’s the only thing she has left.

Amanda laughs, leans in to kiss her. Her lips are soft and sweet, tender in all the ways that she herself has always been, all the ways that Berlin has never been and will never be. She lets her eyes slide shut and swallows it all down, Amanda’s taste and her tenderness, her kiss and her compassion and _her_. She swallows her down, all of her, and can’t believe how much it doesn’t hurt.

“This town,” Amanda whispers, a promise breathed against the corner of her mouth, “is your home.”

—

_Home_.

She doesn’t let the word sink in until she’s alone, until it’s dark and deathly quiet and she’s already scared out of her mind. When Amanda’s gone back to the mayor’s office or wherever the hell she spends her nights these days, when the moonlight is doing a lousy job of lighting up the floor and the walls and the empty cells, when Berlin finds herself missing the sounds of sex, the whispers of whores and clients in the corridors and the _‘in, out, in, out’_ of the NeedWant, when she is so lost and lonely and frightened that nothing could possibly make it worse… only then does she let herself think about it.

 _Home_. Over and over, she lets it echo inside her head, and tries to imagine a time when she can look out on Defiance and see a place like that.

The lawkeeper’s office definitely isn’t home. Amanda’s right about the convenience, about the sleeping space and living space and kitchen space all within a few paces or so, but that doesn’t make it any less uncomfortable. She’s probably right about the people too, when she says that they’ll feel safe just seeing the lawkeeper’s light on, but all that safety doesn’t make her feel any better when she’s squinting up at the ceiling and listening to her heartbeat spiraling down into panic and pounding and pain.

The silence chafes. It pushes and pulls against her, tugs under her skin like an ill-fitted holster, like Amanda’s stupid fancy shirts; it makes her feel wrong inside herself, like her body is too tight in all the wrong places, like her heart doesn’t fit in her chest. It makes her ache for something loud, something angry and chaotic, anything that might distract her for a moment or two, anything that will keep her from thinking, keep her from feeling, keep her from listening to the sound of her own terrified breathing.

She can hear Yewll’s instructions in the back of her head, clipped and clinical and precise, but of course she ignores them. She doesn’t stay in bed, and she definitely doesn’t stay horizontal. For all its so-called convenience, the closest approximation to a bed this place boasts is a ragged little sleeping pallet gathering dust against the back wall. It doesn’t look even remotely comfortable, and though she’s slept on far worse, still the sight of it makes her anxious. She avoids it like the plague, and the hard-looking chair as well; in any case, after what feels like a lifetime strapped to a bed she can’t bear the thought of being still. She’s too raw, like an exposed nerve, and though it hurts like hell to move it’s more than she can do to keep from pacing.

There’s a mirror taped to the wall in some disused little corner, no doubt a souvenir from Nolan’s stay here. He never was the type to stray too far from his own reflection, not when he had something to brag about, and it’s not too hard to imagine him striking poses in front of the damn thing with a badge on his chest and a firearm in each hand. If Berlin sticks around for long enough to make this place a real office again, she’ll probably throw it out, along with all the other shtak he’s left behind, but right now she finds herself drawn to the glass like a moth to a flame.

It’s not good, the sight that greets her. It’s really, really not good. She’s painfully thin, for a start, hard-won muscles burned away from too much time on her back, too much time spent healing and recovering and eating through tubes, too much blood lost and too much strength washed away. She’s so thin, and she looks so damn tired. It’s not the usual kind of tiredness, no more than it’s the usual kind of thinness; she’s used to seeing herself looking drained, but this runs so much deeper than that, dark circles under her eyes and a paper-pale pallor to her skin, like the healing has sucked all the life out of her in all the places that used to matter.

Her shirt’s hanging loose, unbuttoned so she can get to the stitches beneath without pulling at them, and she shrugs out of it almost without thinking. The door’s not locked; anyone could walk in — _Amanda_ could walk in — but Berlin doesn’t care. It’s not just the jutting of her ribs or the shadows under her eyes that tell stories; the rest of her has its share too, and she wants to read them all. SHe wants to find the shadows of her old self just like she did that first morning after, before Mercado and Pottinger, before _‘the Earth Republic thanks you for your service,’_ before she lost the only family she could remember with any real clarity. She wants to see her soldier’s body again, wants to remember what it looks like, remember that it’s still there, that it is still a part of her.

The stitches are clean and even, perfect little straight lines that make the injury look so much smaller than it feels. Doc Yewll is exceptionally good at what she does, and Berlin spends a long time just staring at her handiwork, squinting at the space between the stitching, searching for a spot of blood, some faint trace of the wound underneath, proof that somewhere underneath all the neatness and knitted flesh there’s a wound that almost killed her. She can’t find anything like that, though, nothing at all. Just those perfect little lines, clean and straight and simple, like a placeholder for a scar that doesn’t exist yet.

It won’t be alone when it does. Berlin has plenty of scars, big and small and everything in between, though very few are knitted together as well as this one will be. Most of them are jagged, uneven and poorly mended, but they fit her just as comfortably, stars and comets of white on white to mark the places where she lived. It’s the story of her life, a life scored out in hits taken and pain endured, in bullets and shrapnel and broken-off blades, in all those little pieces of war that broke into her body uninvited and never left.

What’s one more to add to all of that? What difference does Yewll’s precision stitching make, except as a reminder that this is the first she’s won in Defiance, the first she’ll wear without a uniform.

She turns to the side, sucking in her breath when the stitches give an unpleasant tug. Her shoulders are bare, and the half-light catches the eagle tattoo etched across the right, faith and family burned under her skin in E-Rep colours. Her brothers and sisters in arms, the only world that ever meant anything to her; it was a no-brainer, giving it that kind of permanence, and she hadn’t even needed to think about it at the time. Those early years were a crucible, the kind of coming-of-age where she didn’t have time to take slowly, the kind she wouldn’t have even if she could, and it was only fitting that she branded the spoils onto her body, that she made it a part of her, inescapable and forever.

It should hurt more than it does, seeing it again now. False hope, false promises, a false family who turned their backs on her, tattoos and all. She’ll be wearing their mark for the rest of her life, not just the holes torn into her by bullets and blades and whatever else, but the one she chose for herself as well, the uniform inked underneath her clothes. It won’t wash out, no more than the scars will, no more than the memories that shaped them, a different kind of scar carving out its own space inside of her head. It will always be a part of her, just like she wanted at the time, and it feels so unnatural to look at it now, alone and isolated, and not cry.

That life isn’t hers any more. Those people aren’t her family; they turned their backs on her when she needed them, then threw her away when it looked like someone else might find out. She should look at that crest, the familiar brand that gave her so much comfort during so many long and painful missions, so many broken and lonely nights, should see it now and feel cheated, wronged, hateful. She should, maybe, but she doesn’t. She just feels like she’s drifting, like she has to be reborn again, like she has to go back to being what she was before she joined the E-Rep, that scared and lonely kid they saved by teaching her how to save herself, like she has to learn how to do that all over again.

That’s the problem, though. Hers, not theirs. She’s too old to learn things now, and there’s not enough clean skin left on her body to brand with someone else’s crest.

And, yeah, maybe that’s as much of Amanda’s ‘closure’ as she can hope for. Maybe that’s as close as she’ll ever get to understanding and feeling at peace with the fact that she’s still here, still breathing, still not dead. It doesn’t feel like enough, but it’s a whole lot more than she thought she’d find the last time she stared at her body like this, the last time she saw all these scars and long-dissolved stitches; she had so much further to fall back then, and she didn’t even know it, and maybe it means more than she thought it would that she does know it now, that she can look down at that same soldier’s body, as broken as it’s ever been, and see the spaces between the scars, the moments between the marks that she’d always assumed were just tallies of her worth.

It’s a big wound, the hole in her belly, but it will heal small because Yewll is a genius and an expert and can work a needle and thread like no-one Berlin has ever met. Berlin wonders how many more she’ll be able to take, how many fresh new scars can fit across the stretch lines and sinew, how much more shrapnel can get inside her before there’s no room left, before her body gives up and takes her with it. She should hate the way it brings her comfort, thinking of it like that, counting out the space left on her body like a time-bomb. She should, definitely, but she doesn’t. It’s too easy to close her eyes and imagine Amanda’s voice, let her lips shape Amanda’s words, _‘closure’_ and _‘together’_ and _‘I need you.’_

Berlin won’t let herself need Amanda too. She won’t let herself need Defiance, won’t let herself need its people or the way it calls itself _home_.

But maybe she’ll let Defiance need her. Maybe, just a little.

She crosses over to the desk. Battered and barely standing, it gives a precarious wobble when she braces and leans on it. She’s barely standing too, panting and damn near dead just from taking a handful of steps; the table doesn’t feel like it will support her weight for more than a moment at best, but somehow she finds that oddly reassuring. She’s not the only one who can’t stand up on her own, apparently, and that means more to her than she ever thought it would.

A desk is so much easier to fix than a person, though, isn’t it? She thinks about slipping some paper under one of its legs, making it a little sturdier, and then she thinks about asking for a new desk entirely. If she’s going to stick around, she might as well make this place really and truly hers. A new desk, one that can hold itself upright on a good day and hold her upright on a bad day. Her desk, with her things spread out across the surface, camera lenses and ammo clips, pens and pencils and torn-up scraps of paper and cloth. Maybe even one of those novelty coffee cups, with _‘world’s worst lawkeeper’_ printed on it in bright red colours. It’s a ridiculous thought, of course; the town can’t even afford to feed itself right now, much less put out for nonsense like that. Still, though, it makes her smile a little, makes her almost look forward to the day when it can.

The lawkeeper’s badge is sitting in the corner of the desk, tarnished and tired-looking. Amanda threw it down there one morning after a particularly heated argument, and it hasn’t moved since. She probably hoped that if the damn thing sat there for long enough Berlin would just give in and pin it to her chest, but of course that never happened. Instead, the sight of it just made her angry, made her clench her fists and grit out curses that no-one could hear, made her stare at the door with her breath coming fast and think about running for her life.

 _Never_ , she said to herself. _Not me, not that. They can find themselves another damn hero, another damn lawkeeper. I’m not that. I’m not theirs._

But now, all of a sudden, she is.

All of a sudden she’s taking bullets for their mayor; all of a sudden she’s lying on a doctor’s bed for days and days, getting thin and tired, getting stitched up and thrown out to make room for people who have nowhere else to go, people who are hungry and desperate and scared enough to take pieces out of their neighbours or themselves. All of a sudden she’s shivering and scared, alone in the lawkeeper’s office in the middle of the night instead of curled up safe and warm in her bed at the NeedWant, not because it’s closer and has no stairs, but because the people who live in this worthless shtakhole town need to believe that they’re protected and cared for and _safe_.

Here she is, all of a sudden, bleeding and breathing and almost dying for these people, for this town, and it might not mean all the things Amanda wants it to mean, but maybe it also means a little more than what Berlin wanted from it too. A place that needs a lawkeeper, maybe a place that needs her. A place that one day, days or weeks or years from now, she might let herself need too.

She picks up the badge, turns it over in her hands.

 _‘Defiance,’_ it says, and Berlin says it too. “Defiance,” over and over until the word isn’t so scary any more.

It might not be home, at least not yet, but maybe it is hers.

And maybe that’s not really closure, at least not the kind Amanda keeps talking about. Maybe it doesn’t rip like a bullet through all her guilt and pain and hurt, and maybe it doesn’t stitch her back together in perfect little straight lines like Yewll could. Maybe it doesn’t change anything at all. Hell, maybe it _shouldn’t_ change anything. Maybe those things are the way they are for a reason, and maybe she’s not ready to turn away from them. Maybe she will, one day, or maybe she won’t. Maybe she’ll keep them inside her forever, little bits and pieces of shrapnel hidden under sinew and skin and scars. Maybe she’ll bleed them out, wake up one morning and find herself just a little bit lighter and not really know why. Hell, maybe she won’t wake up at all.

Maybe.

But for right now, what she has is enough. A town that needs her, a mayor that kisses her and leaves her warm, a table that can hold her up for a moment longer than she can hold herself.

Small things, silly things, but they add up. They keep her alive.

It’s not easy. Most of the time it hurts so badly she can scarcely see straight. It hurts and it’s hard and it’s horrible, but it’s the truth, and it’s hers, and she’s not going to turn her back on it any more.

She’s here. She’s breathing. She’s _alive_.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s reason enough to live.

—


End file.
